Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

hn_throwaway_99

I'm skeptical for the following reasons:

1. Companies like Twilio largely created the explosion in spam calls by providing extremely cheap, programmable calls, so I'm always a little skeptical when the company selling the poison is also selling the antidote. 2. I really don't like the idea of a single company being responsible for a global verification system for something like phone calls. How are decisions made over what is verified (e.g. the example shows "call purpose" snippets on the screen - if I put something there saying "I have an important flight update", but then my call is "You're only getting free peanuts on your flight, but if you enroll in this MileagePlus card you'll get snack mix too!" who judges that?)

Overall I'd just say with all the consolidation of power with US tech giants I am extremely wary of giving them anything else that could consolidate that power further. I would much prefer an open, federated model.

>Companies like Twilio largely created the explosion in spam calls by providing extremely cheap, programmable calls...

Nah, Twilio has existed for a decade. Spam calls exploded because of court decisions https://www.apnews.com/f9e6e715ebef4c058499fef9efece977

Twilio is not responsible for much spam at all. Their prices are way too high to begin with. And you have no way to spoof your outgoing number.

One would just use a turn-and-burn via twilio. Get 10000s of cheap robot calls out, use their AVMD and have a ball

It's been awhile but I believe it is much easier to use something like Asterisk and a sip provider to spoof calls then twillo.

Twilio is the sip provider you'd hook your Asterisk system up to. They're not the cheapest, but it is very easy to sign up with them.

It seems like a small pivot in their model. Before they sold cheap access to programmatic telephony and now they sell access to customer-valued telephony. Assuming there’s some stick against abuse (e.g. company verification + response to complaints about the purpose tag) then Twilio can profit by doing good.

Maybe in the future, yes, but it's an iterative process to solve something big like robocalls. I haven't read too much about this yet but I would imagine there is some method of reporting numbers that abuse this feature.

A really simple CA model would solve this perfectly. In practice it's centralized and "just works" for most people, but it is decentralized in nature and allows you to switch authorities at will.

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