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Comment by nimish | Hacker News Reader

It took this long because the fcc is run by people who simply do not believe in using government to enforce oversight.

Good thing we replaced career lobbyist Tom Wheeler with someone who would actually do something, right? Are we so looking at the FCC through our worldview that we can't even acknowledge positive action?

Wheeler was born on April 5, 1946 in Redlands, California. He attended Ohio State University.[7] From 1969 to 1976, Wheeler led the trade group Grocery Manufacturers of America.[8] He then went on to work at the National Cable & Telecommunications Association from 1976 to 1984, becoming president of the trade group in 1979. For a year until its closure, Wheeler was president of NABU Network, before spending a number of years creating or running several different technology startups. In 1992, he became the CEO of the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association, a post he held until 2004.

Not US citizen so I only looked at it through the spectrum of some Ars Technica article, but I had the impression that this Wheeler guy had a pretty great record while leading FCC: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/how-a...

Nobody claimed Wheeler was any better.

We shouldn't interfere in the free market. Those robocalls are just good old American ingenuity.

Indeed. I'm from the Netherlands and never, ever in my life received a robocall, and also do not know anyone else who received one.

I'm from the Netherlands (born and raised) and have received several robocalls, until I registered my phone number on the bel-me-niet.nl web site.

Since then, I only get such calls from companies that got my details in exchange for some freebie. I tell them I'm not interested, and would they please stop calling me, and they do.

The only calls I got recently were in English with a heavy Indian accent, "Ilse Smid" or another stereotypically Dutch name, claiming to be from Microsoft Windows, and that my computer had alerted them that it had a virus... These scam calls all came from nonexistent Dutch phone numbers.

I live in Belgium. I receive such a call on average twice a (week) day. Sometimes it's just blank call (nobody answers) sometimes they're offering gifts if I go to shop X, they ask if I want to compare my phone/energy bill.

The funniest one is when my fixed line provider (let's call it P) calls me on my mobile phone (which is another provider) and ask me if I'm one oh their (P) customer :-) (the explanation is that the mobile/fixed businesses are separated to avoid monopoly and, since they can't share customer data ('cos of data protection rules), they have to ask them again :-))

Seconded for the P. They call me every 3 months. Every single one promises they'll note in their CRM how I wont be contacted again. None can answer why they didn't read the note from all their previous calls.

The deep level of suffering is very obvious in your post. Everything will be okay, but you really don't know the joys of relentless robocall spam that you're missing out on.

Australia speaking. We get a buttload of spam calls from China (in Chinese, no less).

Parliament should get on that

People like to razz on it for being a free market, but it's really a gov. backed oligopy.

There is alot of people that do not have a proper understanding of what free market is, and misdirect the failing of the current markets from their proper blame point (government) to what they have associated with "free markets", failing to understand the influence that existing regulations have had on those markets including elimination of competition in the market.

Telco has not been a free market, ever.

Such a disingenuous argument. The government quite frankly ties the free-market with weird regulations that essentially prevent competition. And then we get snarky comments such as this that say "oh wow, look how badly the free-market failed". For an example of free market trying to solve this, albeit not in a great way, have a look at TrueCaller and similar software.

The regulations are not "weird". Before telcos were required to route all calls without discrimination, they didn't. And as soon as telcos are no longer required to route their competitors' calls, they stop. A recent example is the new area code for VOIP calls introduced in Germany in 2009. Major telcos just didn't route them, citing "technical reasons" despite being able to route local area numbers with the same mechanism without problem.

Competition is only a solution for problems where the telcos' interest and the consumers' interest align. And that's very rare.

? Telecom is one of most regulated industries in the United States. Not sure why this pattern ("look how bad the free market is" @ highly regulated market) is so common here and on reddit.

Because apparently every discussion on every message board needs to be hijacked to talk about one of the internet's four favorite political narratives, if there is any marginal relationship whatsoever.

Someday we'll have A.I. to screen calls for us, and hopefully it can also screen this highly-upvoted-but-worthless tripe from message boards for us.

I'm pretty sure they were being sarcastic.

He is criticizing the sarcasm.

> here and on reddit

If you pay upvotes and karma, you get unsubstantiated politicised arguments. The feedback mechanism rewards those comments.

I agree. Free the telcos to strictly requiring authenticated calls, so i can freely choose to ignore some calls.

extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Otherwise, every hyperbole will have to be considered as irrefutable truth.

Or, is the 'who comes up with wittiest hyperbole' is the type of 'thought exchange' framework you would like to engage in?

This has been going on for a long long time - while the FCC was trying to expand it's mandate to net neutrality instead of actually doing it's job.

Well, actually...

That kinda/sorta was the mandate, until we put a telecom shill in charge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_Open_Internet_Order_2010

Where did congress grant the FCC the authorities for that order?

Ahem.

"An independent U.S. government agency overseen by Congress, the commission is the United States' primary authority for communications law, regulation and technological innovation."

Source: https://www.fcc.gov/about-fcc/what-we-do

You can have arguments until forever about what they should or shouldn't do, but their raison d'être is to set policy according to these overarching objectives.

Oh, and just to be clear, the lack of an Oxford comma in that quote is inexcusable :)

Ahem, the authority comes from Title 2 passed in 1934.

In 2005, the FCC decided that ISPs should be regulated by them. From 2005 - 2012, Congress failed to pass new bills granting the FCC this authority. It was denied by congress. In 2015, the FCC decided that they didn't congress to grant that authority.

So yeah, the FCC website claiming they have an authority is not an impartial source. Two years later, the FCC reverted back to the Title I classification.

So for 2 years, the FCC claimed a power that they were not authorized to claim.

If Congress wants the FCC to have this power they can easily pass a bill granting them that authority, they have repeatedly failed to do so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S...

The very first sentence of the communications act of 1934 says the FCC exists to regulate communication by wire, congress need not pass a law granting it[1]. And what wording could the new law possibly use that is more explicit than the existing "for the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire"

It's inexplicable that the same party that claims the act establishing the FCC is more limited than the wording states while the federal arbitration act is continuously expanded to cover cases that neither the authors nor previous courts ever tolerated.

[1]https://transition.fcc.gov/Reports/1934new.pdf

Seriously, read this - you'll learn something.

https://www.rpc.senate.gov/policy-papers/why-title-ii-is-not...

The GOP lays out an obviously slanted view about why they are opposed to the "utility-style" regulation that Title II entails.

However, this assumes that the market is functional when it's been clear since the '96 Telecom Act that it has been anything but. The idea that the FCC can't claim this authority without Congress acting first is FUBAR.

From pricing (generally higher for lower speed) to barriers to entry (the upfront cost for infrastructure is enormous), time has shown that carriers and ISPs will refuse to behave unless they are forced to.

Legislation is needed, but Republican arguments that a light touch will "preserve innovation" or some other nonsense doesn't work. 1993 was a long time ago and almost anyone who cares about this issue will tell you that Internet access is a utility (essential service, widely available, for reasonable cost) but the incumbent providers don't act like one.

(Save for maybe Google/WebPass, Sonic, and any number of municipal broadband initiatives)

Bit off topic wrt robocalls, but on topic wrt FCC mandates.

What do you think about the 'Free Press' group asking FCC to sensor Trump's corona virus updates?

Does FCC have authority to do that?

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/02/far-left-media-group-as...

It was granted in the Telecommunications Act of 1934.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934

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