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Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

At some point the cure is in fact not worse than the disease. Robocalls are so bad at this point that, if I could get away with it, I wouldn't have a phone number, at all.

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.

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If that were the only way of eliminating robocalls you might have a point, but I think this situation is a good example of a case where relatively targeted regulation coupled with technical progress (develop+mandate SHAKEN/STIR and allow for an ecosystem of filtering solutions based on accurate caller origin info) is preferable to draconian regulation (enormous fines are totally ignored, revoking common-carrier status/other liability changes have a fractal of side-effects).

For starters what you’re suggesting is logically equivalent to completely removing all net neutrality principles. Allowing service providers complete discretion over service discrimination.

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.

No, I'm not.

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".

Some days my call log is a solid wall of dozens of calls coming from (ostensibly) Chad or Nigeria or whatever that are pulling the one-ring scam. The number is different every time so there’s no blocking it. It’s out of control.

Around here they mostly spoof local numbers.

E.g. My number is ABC-DEF-1234, I'll get calls from ABC-DEF-7899.

Yeah, if the primary economic model of a phone number is to allow 3rd parties to spam individuals, then the phone number needs to die.

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