Go after the providers. Someone is providing them a gateway.
I also think that common carriers can still ban such activity.
The common carrier statute says carriers may not "unreasonably discriminate* against customers.
I have to imagine most sane individuals would consider cutting off customers engaged in obviously illegal activity as, in fact, reasonable.
Just like USPS can turn over packages containing drugs to the Feds.
Just think about what you’re suggesting for more than a second. Do you want your base contract to only allow you to send and receive calls within the service providers network? Do you want to have people trying to call you get caught up in an endless web of spam filters? Do want to have to pay extra for the ability to receive calls from over seas? How do you think developing economies would fare if they could essentially never make a phone call to the US again?
Because all that and worse would be an inevitable outcome of the rules you’re suggesting.
The phone system is an open and distributed system, just like email is. It’s everything HN should love. But then you get comments like this which at the first sign of a system showing its natural distributed-system-related short comings, are all of a sudden asking for centralised walled gardens.
There is a massive difference between discriminating based on who the customers are, and discriminating based on "all customers doing this one specifically completely illegal thing".
E.g. My number is ABC-DEF-1234, I'll get calls from ABC-DEF-7899.
It enforces the carriers to implement the authention/blocking/reporting system. It also talks about misclassification and fail-safes too. FCC should create rules:
> establishing a safe harbor for a provider of voice service from liability for unintended or inadvertent blocking of calls or for the unintended or inadvertent misidentification of the level of trust for individual calls based, in whole or in part, on information provided by the call authentication frameworks under subsection
With a list of exceptions for legit stuff like setting a company's inwats number as CID even if the call comes from a branch, etc. I'm sure there's a finite universe of such cases.
The calls don't bother me so much as the spoofing does. I can do my own filtering if I have accurate info to work from. It's the havens allowing bad info into the network that we need to aggressively exclude.