Always want to fill out the old https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt form with these ideas. Like the open world / closed world AI problem.
I received one spam call in the last 10 years, and the guy exused himself when I told him what he is doing is illegal.
This feels a bit like “weapon laws won’t solve anything” and “social healthcare can’t ever work”. So either Europe is living in an weird strand of alternate reality, or maybe some problems _are_ solvable if you really want to.
If a call originates from an untrusted network, you remove the number or indicate that it is user-provided and probably fake. It would help if phones would properly display the difference (P-Asserted-Id present or not).
1. They issued all their phone numbers according to a geographic system, the North American Numbering Plan. Most cities would have one prefix, some larger ones gradually needed two or more, but basically you can tell from a number if the call is local.
2. Calls to local numbers were cheap or free, because routing a call on a circuit a few miles costs essentially nothing. Just spread the cost over all subscribers, it's fine.
3. Mobile telephones exist. NANP is full. How do we number these new phones? Let's give them local numbers wherever you're buying the phone.
4. Oh, but calls for a mobile cost more. Do we make everybody pay extra for the small fraction with mobiles? No. Can we charge callers for calling a mobile? They'd have no way to know they're getting charged because the numbers are local! OK, so let's charge _mobile owners_ when they receive a call.
5. Then everybody buys a mobile phone.
The end state is always the same, everybody eats the cost of maintaining a network and calls are basically free. But the way they got there was different from most countries.
But this has not much to do with the phenomenon that spam is pretty much nonexistent compared to the US
I think that explains why it is much harder to do robocalls in some parts of europe at least.
Now that I think of it, it mostly stopped. Could it be GDPR?
Worse, Gmail’s spam filter generates tons of false positives, and these are often the messages I want most: password resets, legit balance alerts from my bank.
Your article advocates a (X) technical solution to robocalling.
Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(X) Requires too much cooperation from telephone service providers
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Extreme profitability of robocalling
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
2) Robocalling is probably not net profitable for the carriers. Much of it originates from abroad and much of it is associated with other kinds of fraud. Never mind the secondary impacts due to users deciding not to get phone lines if they are just going to receive spam.
That list is kinda defeatist and misses the fact that no solution needs to work 100% of the time
Only if you use one of the big email providers or if you pay to route it via some antispam system. If you don't and play around with e.g. Postfix and spamassassin then you'll notice more than enough spam.
I get maybe 1 spam every six months that leaks through. I simply add it to the crm114 filter as "this should be spam" and then no spam again for another six months or so.