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Comment by sansnomme | Hacker News Reader

It's a dangerous path when you force intermediaries to intervene and apply censorship. The path to having ML algorithms analyze every single call you make and receive is paved with intellectual laziness. Would you make the same arguments about end to end encryption? Quick, let's put backdoors in everything so we can feel safer.

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Simpler solution: At the end of a call, the recipient can dial some number, like * SPAM, and the phone company who routed the call to your number is charged 25 cents. Presumably the routing phone company will pass this charge back down the chain until it reaches the caller. You must dial * SPAM within 2 minutes from the end of the call for the charge to take effect.

There is no appeal. If you don't like a call for any reason, you can dial * SPAM, and the caller is charged 25 cents. Since the report must be immediate, VOIP providers only need to require a deposit for two minutes of calling volume, and they can throttle their customers to make sure that the reserve is always present. Callers don't need to be verified or have good credit, they just need to have 25 cents.

Sounds like an easily abused system.

How?

Yup, my first thought was that I could fine my friends $0.25 for calling me... You know, just for fun. If a company calls me and I don't like what they said, $0.25 fine. Someone dials a wrong number, how dare they, $0.25 fine.

Features.

(Think about it.)

Even better, let everyone set the fee for calling them and the ability to set up a whitelist. Numbers not on the whitelist get charged (message before connecting stating the amount). I'd set it to $10. To each their own.

I like the flat 25 cents. It's not so much that if someone wants to be malicious that they can do much damage, but if robocallers have to pay 25 cents, it destroys the economics.

Since you have to object to a call within a short period of time, you could get an immediate text message that someone had flagged your call and just not call that person again.

If you were making legitimate high volume calls, you'd get a certain number of people doing this to you, and then you'd just flag it and not call them again or maybe stop doing business with them. Either it's a sign that they don't want you calling them, so you should probably stop.

Collection agencies and such would get a lot of flagged calls, but collection agencies are supposed to stop calling if you ask them to, so this is just an automated way of making that request.

The real cause of all of these robocalls is that calling has gotten so cheap. It used to cost well over $1/minute to call from say, India to the U.S. Even within the U.S., in the 80s and early 90s, it would usually cost about 25 cents a minute to make a domestic long distance call. In many places, including where I grew up, a local call to your next door neighbor cost 5 cents. If the risk of being charged 25 cents for a call is a barrier to making a call, you probably shouldn't be making it.

You could, but you wouldn't have many friends left after a while. And it's not like the money would go to you.

Yes, because it was described in a comment with only a few minutes' worth of thought. The idea is sound - there are a ton of fairly obvious ways to fix the biggest flaws and improve the system.

Figure out how many calls the big offenders need to be profitable, and set the amount accordingly. Maybe a penny would be enough.

Now you're thinking!

However, the financial layer needs to be set up before the call is initiated, not after.

Otherwise, it's ripe for abuse.

Also, making end-users perform extra actions is just BLEH!

But it is also very dangerous to do what telco's did, they connected circuit network that was designed as a network of trusted peers to the untrusted network of public internet without implementing proper gateways and/or enforcing certain rules. So slapping them with fines is more of a reap what you sow thing than punishment.

Why on Earth do you think backdoors and ML having any part in the solution?

Telcos peer with one another and trust each other's traffic implicitly, all they need to do is stop trusting implicitly and ask for verification for things like caller id.

A Telco may not know where a call originates but they know what Telco it's coming from and can pass responsibility for fines back to that Telco.

Since no Telco wants to be saddled with fines, they'll quickly pass it off and it will eventually reveal the origination.

Requiring telcos to assist in fighting spam calls and wire fraud is not "censorship" by even the most lenient use of the word - it's saving elderly or non-techie citizens from being stolen from. Nobody mentioned backdoors or ML algorithms, either - stop strawmanning.

No it's not. Why would you want to give telcos even more power? Let dumb pipes be dumb pipes. The whole idea that telcos should moderate incoming calls is just begging for for non-call-neutrality and pay-for-play. HN is obsessed with net-neutrality but apparently the same sentiment does not extend to other communication platforms.

No it's not. Telecoms allowing to use their platform for abuse and doing nothing about it because it helps their business.

Similar with Amazon allowing seller selling fakes and counterfeits.

So holding them responsible is a wake up call for them where doing nothing from their side is no longer an option.

Telecoms absolutely have powers and know-hows to detect and deter abusive practices.

As someone who has been involved in telco routing / call infrastructure, I agree and disagree. Most telcos hate that their networks are being flogged by these short duration calls. When they have the engineering competence / business ethics / operational focus in place, solutions emerge and have been around for awhile. You won’t get them all but simple heuristics that’s others have described above will squash the big abusers. The problem is these spam artists, prey on the fact that like the old internet of twenty years ago, a bad actor could relatively easily exploit weaker networks. Like most things I expect the first 80% of this problem will get resolved pretty quickly and then we will see some sort of vendor driven standards that become available / implemented within the next year.

Edit: I think one interim solution could be a dcma-style process whereby carriers prove to the fcc that they maintain an auditable takedown process that can be initiated by the consumer and that the carrier is applying reasonable technological solutions to minimize / detect en masse robocalls.

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