But you were right about one thing, telecoms do profit a lot from the robocalls.
Telephone numbers used to be handled pretty much like IPv4 addresses. A telecom would get a block of numbers and distribute those to their customers. It wasn't really possible for you to move your number from one carrier to the next.
The 2003 rule change around number porting forced a bunch of upgrades to telecoms to make it possible for any phone operator to send out a call for any number.
Are you trying to claim that's the reason that anyone can forge a number? Because I don't buy it. Just because you're forced to accept an inbound number doesn't mean you don't log where the number came from -- the peer service provider at the very least.
And then what are you supposed to do with the peer service provider data? How the heck does that help an operator?
The whole point is VOIP and the porting rules broke the implicit trust relationships that used to exist, and the low level call routing protocols don't have a solution for that - because it could have never been a problem before VOIP and the new porting rules.
Until the underlying call routing protocols for long distance get enhanced, this problem isn't going to be fixed any time soon. And I'm not holding my breath on an overhaul of what is fast becoming legacy infrastructure. And in a VOIP only world establishing trust will be no easier, maybe harder, than doing so with email today - so that's not the answer either :p
Actually if phone providers would prefix calls from VOIP gateways with an asterix then I could set up a rule to just force all of those to voicemail by default. Would probably kill 90% of the bogus calls. Hell I'd pay an extra $5 a month for that feature.
If I get a robocall, my carrier owes me $100. They can then collect $100 from the peer they got it from, etc.
This will cause carriers to only peer with good carriers, not fly-by-night VoIP clown shows.
I will set up a front company, and create thousands of phone customers that are hard to track back to me. Then I'll have my front company call all of my 1000 fake customers repeatedly. Those customers collect $100 each for every call from the phone carrier, and when the phone carrier tries to collect from the originator, poof, they don't exist anymore.
Very likely, if this $100 fine came into play, the first change telcoms would implement is verifying every single line in and out to make sure this exact situation can't happen. Will be cool to need a passport and birth certificate to get a new phone number.
In many countries, it is impossible to get even a VoIP number without showing an ID, and in some (like Bulgaria) it should be a local ID.
In Europe, esp eastern europe, like Bulgaria, there's a vast market of stolen phones, stolen or resold sims. You'll have to ditch them after several weeks of course. But it is not in any way impossible.
I'd guess it's the same in Americas.
It's been several years since I worked at an MVNO, so I can't say much about how do you get number capacity nowadays, but back then that was literally the least problem imaginable.
I don't think my cell carrier is making anything on the spam text I get. At this point, it's also a negligible cost to them.
Telegrams gave way to phones, but it was never possible to spam someone with telegrams, and they had a cost per word.
"Yea, so here is an app you will love! Install it, and it allows anyone, anywhere, anytime, to interrupt whatever you are doing on your device, background whatever app you are running, cause it to ring, buzz, and notify! Further, if you press the green button, it will allow that random person to start talking to you."
Even if it managed to get past either of the app stores' rules, who would install such an intrusive app?
Yet, every smartphone sold today has that exact annoying app pre-installed!
Also, what if you could set time and day for availability - i.e. for work related numbers.
A large weakness with existing communication systems (phone, e-mail, physical mail) is that its a pipe where anyone in the world can blast at you, often anonymously.
On top of that the telcos are joining in on the fun. I am an AT&T cell phone subscriber and in the last month they’ve started robo-calling me non-stop to sign up for their ailing DirecTV service. Who in their right mind would subscribe to that with all the better streaming options available? But the worst part is that they technically aren’t breaking the rules themselves because we do have an existing business relationship (if you can call paying my bill on time and doing everything in my power not to otherwise interact with them a relationship).
I recently got one of those, and I'm not an AT&T customer.
It's bizarre that AT&T would sabotage the usefulness of their own customers' telephone service, but this is a bizarre world.
Oddly enough I remember DirecTV doing this ~20 years ago. It was the first time I was willing to pay for CallerID. DirecTV (or some representative that had that as their outgoing name) called me several hundred days in a row. I ended up making a game out of it, seeing how many times they’d call back if I never answered.
Large swaths of the US can't get usable broadband. These people use satellite TV services. Of course that market is already developed so growth requires pestering the people with better choices available.