Robocalls have made my telephone so useless as a telephone that I'm beginning to wonder if I even need a telephone number at all, just as I started wondering if I actually needed a house phone or cable.
Now if only I were allowed to dispose of my mailbox I could have a home free of advertising. Yesterday I received an infuriating catalog from Restoration Hardware that weighed a pound and a half, all because I bought one awful product that fell apart in a few months and had to be recycled. It amazes me that we subsidize such obnoxious ads being delivered to every resident.
That decade-long social norm is dead. Now all phones are for being advertised to.
In Australia basically every mailbox has that on it and it is enforced by law.
https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/508.htm
Sections "1.1.2 Refusal at Delivery" and "1.1.3 Refusal After Delivery".
Here in Finland I think 97%+ of physical advertisement "mail" is non-addressed and the carriers of those respect "no ads" signs (no address => ad).
I think this might be different in US in that advertisement mail is usually addressed?
It's actually the other way around. The amount of bulk mail helps to keep costs low for the USPS. I have receiving it, but it does make things cheaper, because it is only delivered when there's capacity (less busy days).
Naturally you just can't expect a comprehensive fiber network in the largest metropolitan area in the Western world, though.
The german telcos have to my knowledge also started to block large lists of numbers used by the scammers if they are incoming calls. Some stuff still works like callback scams (They ring you for a few seconds, then hang up, calling back is expensive).
There is also the difference that the US is 300 million people that basically all speak english, which is a cheap option to hire for in Indian callcenters. Europe is much more diverse and the languages are more expensive to hire for, so it's less profitable.
Based on my understanding of our phone system it's a bit easier here though, as we don't have the split in operators of the core landline network - it's all OpenReach underneath.
MY dad went through a phase of being plagued because he is from a time when it would be considered rude not to engage in the conversation. As a consequence I suspect he was on some kind of suckers list?
It took a while to train him off this habit, then he discovered email...