Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

The FCC has dragged their scapegoat into the public square to torture in a big show for the brutalized masses. But how effective has the FCC been at actually curtailing the problem of robocalls?

This FCC won't do anything meaningful because they've been bought off by the telecoms, and the telecoms make money hand over fist on robocalls:

http://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-fcc-ro...

"The problem," he said, "is that for the carriers, it's a conflict of interest. All of these robocallers represent billable minutes. From a revenue standpoint, anything they do to crack down represents a reduction of billable traffic on their networks."

Same way this FCC's purported "deregulation" of net neutrality is a sham which rigs the game so that the telecoms can leverage their market dominance in more verticals.

We know what the technical solutions are for the problem of robocalls. Corruption and legalized bribery are preventing the application of those technical solutions.

Do you have a source that’s not an offhand quote suggesting that carriers make any significant revenue from robo calls? Also, most robo calls are made through VoIP services. Aren’t they the one with the most financial incentive to keep robocalls going, and the ones that could most easily detect them? By the time the robocall gets to a carrier’s network, its already been mixed with tons of legitimate traffic from VoIP users.

I work in telecoms.

The billable minutes thing is absolutely true. You might not directly pay for them as a customer, but carriers pay each other for inbound calls, so whatever carrier that is originating the robocalls is paying the next carrier in the chain, and that one pays the next, and so on until it finally reaches your phone. We’re not talking much on a single call (the prices are often around 0,01$ or even less) but when you take all the robocalls originated in a single day that adds up to quite a bit.

The inter exchange fees are a way to divvy up the revenue collected at the call originator. At the end of the day, the total amount of revenues once all those payments are netted out is going to be limited by how much the robocaller companies are paying for phone service. Is there any evidence that is a lot of money that creates incentives for corruption, as OP implies?

I believe that for some carriers the billable minutes thing is significant. But what I'm really skeptical of is rectang's assertion that the FCC has been bought off by the same carriers for whom this is significant revenue.

I certainly believe that the FCC is too influenced by large telcoms companies. As we see with the Michael Cohen thing, large companies believe they can buy influence. But those same companies that are receiving the calls are mainly paid by consumers. Is TMobile really willing to risk losing my ~$100/month to get whatever they do for calls I don't answer?

I'm sure there are carriers for whom the robocalls are a major slice of revenue. But are any of them nearly as big as the consumer-focused telecoms companies?

It’s not really been bought off by those exact carriers, but by the telco industry as a whole.

The industry is honestly shady as fuck. They’re being pushed into irrelevance by the internet and VoIP (where there’s no such thing as paying for minutes, thankfully), have thousands of employees to pay (despite not doing much, as they became irrelevant over time), and so while incoming call revenue is maybe 1% of total revenue for someone like T-Mobile, it’s still paying for some useless people’s pay checks, so of course those are gonna fight back.

Now aggregate that across the entire industry - everyone fighting for their 1% of total revenue - and you’ve still got a strong pushback.

Finally your carrier knows they’re not going to loose your 100$/month over robocalls because you have nowhere to go. The situation might change if one carrier bites the bullet and implements a working solution (but good luck given that it requires industry-wide cooperation), then the other carriers will wake up as they now know customers actually have a competitor to go to.

T-Mo has two larger and one smaller national competitors. Do they want the $0.50 they get from robo callers more than the $70 they get from luring a user away from Verizon or AT&T?

Even if they wanted the 70$, at the moment there’s nothing they can do about robocalls without cooperation from the entire industry. A robocall doesn’t look any more shady than a normal call from a receiving carrier’s perspective; whatever solution they come up with will have tons of false positives.

> A robocall doesn’t look any more shady than a normal call from a receiving carrier’s perspective; whatever solution they come up with will have tons of false positives.

Doesn't that undermine a major premise of the OP's post? That one should assume corruption, because it's technically easy to filter robo calls and carriers don't do it only because they love the sweet, sweet, robo call inter-exchange fees?

It sounds like filtering robo calls would require cooperation not only among telcos, but also with the VoIP providers that originate these calls.

While you cannot say for certain that a particular call is coming from a robot, being a major network you can make a very good guess. E.g. when the same origin hits every number with a caller ID in that number's exchange just block that origin from your network. If there is a legitimate reason for this - they will contact you immediately and sort it out. Bonus point - spammers will hit the competitors networks with more bandwidth and force even more people to consider switching.

The current situation is the one, which requires cooperation of the whole industry, actually. It's a prisoner's dilemma in the sense that the first one to implement anti-spam will gain a temporary advantage but eventually everyone will have to implement it and keep up with the spammers who will be finding new ways to circumvent these measures. As it stands now - nobody gains advantage and nobody has to spend money on anti-spam and lose revenue from spam at the same time. As little as it is, taking your $70 and $0.05 from spammers is a lot better than taking your $70 and zero from spammers.

> when the same origin hits every number

There is no real concept of "origin". Unless you're the direct upstream carrier of the originator of the robocalls, the robocalls will be diluted with legitimate calls in such a way no single inbound carrier stands out.

I see, are there second layer provides agregating multiple VoIP retailers? I thought VoIP route directly to the big telcos networks. But even in this case - just drop the whole 2nd layer provider and they will quickly deal with their spammer clients.

Big carriers* often route directly, but even then, it's not guaranteed (they could use a third-party or even a competitor as a fallback in case their own interconnect goes down), and to be fair, big carriers (Twilio, etc) are decent at fighting abuse - it's not them we need to worry about.

Small & shady carriers are where the problem is, and those often just resell capacity from bigger carriers (some of which in turn resell even bigger carriers), or sometimes even resell illegal "black" or "grey" routes as they're called, could even be compromised servers from legitimate customers of big carriers.

In the end this entanglement mixes legitimate calls with malicious ones by the time they reach the destination (final) carrier, making it impossible for them to drop malicious calls without impacting a lot of legitimate usage.

*I avoid saying VoIP retailers because it doesn't really mean anything; carriers often allow you to use different interconnects, and VoIP is just one of many.

>In the end this entanglement mixes legitimate calls with malicious ones by the time they reach the destination (final) carrier, making it impossible for them to drop malicious calls without impacting a lot of legitimate usage.

No, I did not say "drop calls", I said drop the source. If Twilio got blocked on T-Mobile it would found which re-seller is responsible in no time. If it was their hacked server - they, again, would have found it and patched. It's no different from e-mail spam in early 2000s - all e-mail from a server sending spam would have been blocked, including legitimate e-mail.

On the revenue side, robocalls provide telcos with lots of business opportunities. Start with the "billable minutes".

Consider also that the telcos offer premium services to counter robocalls. Verizon "Caller Name ID" is priced at $2.99/month; for their landlines they sell hardware such as the "Call Blocker Shield". Sprint "Premium Caller ID" (which includes blocking capabilities) costs $2.99/month. T-Mobile "Name ID" is $4/month.

Consider as well that many cell-phone plans are not unlimited and that depending on the plan, incoming calls may count against monthly minute quotas.

On the cost side: the technical solutions to tighten up the network cost money, whether it's implementing heuristic filtering on the existing unreliable network, or working to make the origins of calls reliably identifiable.

Between the revenue and the cost telcos thus have significant incentives to avoid solving the problem of robocalling.

The staggering negative externalities of robocalls, though, are borne by the public. We have a huge collective incentive to see the problem of robocalls solved.

Ajit Pai's FCC won't help the public, though -- it's fine with telcos privatizing profits and socializing losses.

Regulatory capture ("corruption and legalized bribery" in other words) is the critical point that should be raised in every discussion regarding FCC. Without addressing this formative power dynamic, there can be no meaningful progress.

Damn, good point. I figured this should be an easily solvable problem. Stands to reason that the FCC is just letting it happen because they're hilariously corrupt. Definitely one of the most successfully captured regulatory bodies.

This is because Ajit Pai, along with his party, value corporate profit above service to the public.

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