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.

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 :-))

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

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.

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.

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.

I'm pretty sure they were being sarcastic.

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.

> here and on reddit

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