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Comment by inetknght | Hacker News Reader

I've frequently wondered why, in this day and age, telcos are permitted to provide telephone service without any guarantee whatsoever of the originating phone number being accurate.

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I'm baffled that telcos allow this, regardless of regulations.

I get so many robocalls, I stopped answering my phone. But when I get a FaceTime call or an iMessage, I'm on it.

Robocalls dilute the trust consumers have in the phone system. The telcos are rapidly ceding this trust to other forms of communication -- those provided Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook etc. As robocalls proliferate, tech companies win and telcos lose. Unless they fix this, eventually the phone system might go away entirely. Consumers -- especially young people -- won't want or need it.

Telcos are complicit in the crime because they know they're going to make money no matter what. Everyone is paying for 4G LTE and 5G now, and that's not going away. Why bother fixing the legacy phone system when it still brings in extra cash the way it is?

I for one have had calls disabled on my phone for a long time. Couldn't be happier. AT&T, Tmobile, etc... it didn't matter what carrier I had, they would all tell me to install some 3rd party app to block "unknown" calls and robocalls. Absolutely ridiculous.

Telcos are usually your ISP, so they win either way.

And they can upsell you to VOIP service which offers more controls on incoming calls.

... but none of the guarantees that inetknght was bemoaning the lack of.

I don't think they care. Here in Australia at least, unlimited calls/text starts at pretty cheap plan options. It's the data use that's the moneymaker. As long as you're watching videos and snapchatting I don't think they care if you text or not.

I suppose they have even less incentive than internet service providers have to implement BCP 38 spoofing protection.

If it made business sense to do this, it would happen. Until then, it probably won't. Perhaps serving millions of robocalls are more profitable than the number of consumers who will totally cancel their telephone service as a result of them.

Pity there isn't a viable class action plaintiff's bar taking on the provider telcos to make the business case. Until then I'm doing what everyone else seems to be diong, blackholing calls pretending to be from my own exchange, and now trying a device on the landline to filter the ringing (a Lynx).

Part of it is that their are legitimate reasons to spoof CallerID such as when a company wants to set all outgoing calls to show the main company name and number, even when the call originates from a direct inbound dial line. Carriers could block calls from numbers that supposedly don't exist or dial out--and I believe some are starting to offer than as a service. But if they spoof as a real number, that won't work.

I suspect a higher-level issue is that illegal junk calls fall into the mild annoyance category for most people. If the average person was getting a hundred calls a day to the point where they couldn't use their phone service, something would happen.

Those are legitimate, but they are technically easy to solve.

>"If the average person was getting a hundred calls a day to the point where they couldn't use their phone service, something would happen."

This does seem to be the endgame. The last excuse I heard was "what if a friend of a friend wants to invite you to her party so she gets your number from the shared friend, and she also does the same for a bunch of other friends of friends?"

I'm not on it, but judging by the parties I've missed, everyone else uses facebook rather than the phone for this purpose.

This also seems problematic?

Do you ever wonder if Zuck has some kind of ghost profile for you anyway? This person that shows up in photos but has no profile...he probably knows your name and where you fit in the social graph.

He probably has numerous ghosts of me. I know that every time anything gets updated about a small business (phone number, address, principals, etc.) FB spins up a new ghost page for that business. They're not only bad at finding dupes, they're also bad at removing dupes once they've been notified of them.

I wonder how difficult it would be to use PKI to verify the number you're dialing from and the number you say you're dialing from.

The phone companies could only allow spoofing caller ID to a number you already use. That should be easy enough.

It's not. The PSTN isn't one giant cohesive system. It's a federation of lots of companies in lots of countries. Getting such a system in place requires filtering between carriers as well as everyone filtering what subscribers can do. You may have heard: not every country in the world likes every other country, and not every telephony carrier business likes every other telephony carrier business.

It is possible, but easy it definitely is not.

I actually get a large number of calls from gvoice numbers. I tested this myself. I was able to create a Google account and get a number, manually mind you, in less than one minute. Spoofing is one problem... allowing legit rampant abuse is another.

I think they have to allow it so that services like call forwarding work.

Getting a call with the caller ID showing the number you forwarded the call from should be sufficient.

Their lobby is powerful, and the ideology of many in tech leans to libertarian and away from regulation.

You can guarantee that if phone companies shut down this sort of spam calling, someone on HN would complain about "censorship!"

The ideology of many in marketing certainly tends away from regulation.

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