What he is asking for now is that caller IDs be verified. I don't know how realistic that is given the way they are implimented (trivially spoofable) but that's a narrower demand.
The law is not applied by dumb machines. No-one is getting fined in the scenario you mentioned, just like no-one is being fined for calling a pizza place because they found their number on a menu. Behavior can be used to infer consent.
[1] I'm sure it is someone's.
I wouldn't want to see statistical surveys, polling and other grey area items here impacted.
I know the FCC doesn't have express legislative power here, but can't they impose fines or am I mistaken-on either or both?
Since literally everyone I personally know has given up answering calls because of all the spam, I'd say that your "grey area" items are already being impacted.
That was the case before. Political polls and other related things were explicitly exempted.
For example, you "survey" people with questions like "Are you aware that Hello Fresh delivers in your area?" and "Would you be more or less likely to vote for Barack Hussein Obama if you knew he was a Muslim?"
Sadly surveys and polling are already spam, anyone who wants to get rid of phone spam will have to ban nonconsensual telephone polling as well.
At least some of the robodialer operators programatically check out a block of numbers from a VoIP vendor, make a bunch of calls, then release the numbers. If all they have to do is correctly report the number they're calling from, that's pretty useless. The called party has practically no recourse because the number that called them never accepted inbound calls, and has been disconnected by the time you call it back anyway.
How could 'valid caller ID' be defined so that robocallers can be identified?
They simply aren't going to do that unless they're forced by law or regulation.
With spoofed numbers, I’ve seen calls appear to come from an FBI office in Virginia, local and state police divisions, state troopers, and random businesses. There isn’t any way to really deal with those kinds of calls - and you can’t reasonably screen them out.
Honestly, I'd be utterly stunned if this made any noticeable impact at all.
They are trivially spoofable at the tech level. But if there was a "know your customer" style law enforced for telcos, it would be easy to resolve. Telcos know who sends them the call. It's either a) their customer and they're responsible for verification, b) their customer with a signed agreement for caller id substitution (customer is responsible), or c) another telco, and now it's their turn through this question.
Foreign telcos could be a problem, but really, the US can put enough pressure by "comply or we can't legally forward the call" to solve this.
Nobody is looking to saddle non-commercial personal calls with fines or prior consent.
This is exactly the way it should be.
The UK has a lot of white collar crooks who'd really rather you didn't know what they own. Companies House, the regulator and list of all companies incorporated in the UK, was told wink wink to get them to list the actual Human People who control them.
Unsurprisingly in practice the result is full of obvious lies (corporations listed instead of Human People for example) and omissions (companies that claim there is no-one controlling them when obviously they're actually run by a Russian oligarch who suspects his name on the paperwork might make life trickier)
When asked about this Companies House says alas, it doesn't have the funding needed to ever actually prosecute anyone for violating the law. Too bad.
But it turns out they did find enough money to prosecute exactly one person. The person who registered bogus companies with the names of politicians who allowed this bullshit to happen as the Human Persons controlling them. That person, unlike all the tax evading billionaires, crooks, and mass murderers known to be violating the law, got prosecuted...
The _wrong_ lesson is that we shouldn't have asked. The _right_ lesson is that the government is complicit and its regulator needs to be run by somebody who isn't there to cover for the bad guys.