AT&T Will Now Filter Robocall Spam, If You Pay Them Extra | Hacker News Reader

AT&T Will Now Filter Robocall Spam, If You Pay Them Extra

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24 pointsrahuldottech13 comments

So if I pay more for this service and still get robocalls, do I get double my money back, only what I paid back, an apology, or pointed to a section in the terms and services that paying extra guarantees me nothing?

Private entities that knowingly transmit robocalls, spam, and financial scams should be prosecuted for harassment and accessory to fraud. As they've long argued, they're not a common carrier with a responsibility for neutral content transmission.

This may be a dumb question, but when I first moved to the US I was stunned to find that I was paying to receive calls and text messages. Is that still a thing? If so, would knowingly forwarding spam and fraud, and charging you to receive said call be itself fraudulent?

I just had a thought, and it might be a very bad one: why can't robocallers be de-platformed in the same way Facebook and Twitter de-platforms accounts they consider to be harmful on their platforms?

There's no moral reason for any of these actions. AT&T makes money from spammers, so do the other networks, and it's hard to switch phone providers, so they won't stop them.

Unless they are forced to either block the calls or forced to forward the origination information so users can block whatever callers they want using a ublock/adblock style subscription list, this won't stop.

Are you equating moral reasons and economic reasons?

I'm saying that AT&T will never take a moral stand against spammers, and they have no incentive to take an economic stand. Companies like Twitter that "deplatform" (see: ban) users do do because it's more profitable to do so than not for a variety of reasons.

So the only shortish term solution is a legislative one. The long term solution I see is that people will stop using phone service entirely if the reliability does not improve. I'd be fine with that. AT&T wouldn't be but that's beyond their next few fiscal years so I doubt anyone working there now cares.

> There's no moral reason

Of course there is a moral reason. There are moral reasons we can come up with for every possible human action, because morals are subjective. Thus, the statement "There's no moral reason" is always false. The opposite is meaningless (in the same way that saying "water is wet" would be meaningless).

This is nothing but pedantry. All I'm saying is that AT&T isn't going to come up with a good solution to spammers out of the kindness of their hearts.

In the same way that what I said is pedantic, claiming a moral reason is obvious or self-evident is self-righteous. You are implying that to you there is an obvious moral reason and it should be obvious to the reader what that moral reason is. What I was trying to tell you is that it is not obvious to me.

Even now that you've explained the effect of your moral reasoning, I don't understand what makes this moral (or even a reason). Is it a moral reason when they continue to exploit the situation as it is even though it is unfriendly to their customers and stimulates abuse of the system?

We seem to be in agreement that AT&T is exploiting a bad situation. The top poster asked why they don't come up with a more effective solution to eliminate spam calls for good. All I'm saying is that it's naive to assume any phone company will implement such a solution unless forced to do so.

NomoRobo has been doing this for ages. Lots of companies do this already.

First one to do it for free wins the mobile market.

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