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Comment by howdydoo | Hacker News Reader

Phone service is an oligopoly. Spectrum is sold by the government and it is EXPENSIVE. No new companies can join the market, and customers have nowhere to go. So prices are high and companies do the bare minimum.

Email is more of a fair marketplace. In theory, you can even roll your own on a $5/mo VPS. Switching costs are low. You can forward messages anywhere. So email providers cannot charge exorbitant rates or require 12-month contracts, and they must provide better service to retain customers.

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I think you have this backwards. E-mail is actually a good example of why you shouldn't open up communications systems too much. Because they're more or less free to send, people who want to send advertisements send loads of them. This makes e-mail entirely unusable unless you are very proactive in restricting who can send mail to you. Technical limitations like SPF, DKIM, and so on only prevent the worst abuses. What does really work has been IP blacklisting and reputation systems that more or less make rolling your e-mail very difficult.

Yes, you can roll your own e-mail; but you're taking on the challenge of both getting spam out of your incoming mail as well as getting your outgoing mail to be deliverable to everyone else. As a homelab[0] training exercise, it's fun; but businesses that need reliable mail just outsource it all to Google or Microsoft. The end result is that e-mail users more or less reinvented the restrictive systems that phone service used to have before the FCC opened POTS up to everyone that wanted to call an entire state about the their car's extended warranty.

When you mention spectrum limitations, that's for providing mobile phone service; which is only tangentially related to the actual phone call routing these days. Just getting a dialable number or placing a call is hilariously cheap and plenty of services of varying quality will let you do this in bulk. Providing access to that number over wireless spectrum is the expensive part; but you don't need spectrum to spam people.

[0] Don't try to take the word "homelab" literally and run your mail server on your residential ISP. It won't work.

I think you're right, but we're looking at this from opposite angles. We can never stop people trying to make spam calls, because human nature. At the same time, I don't think it's a desirable design goal to have a communication system that isn't open to everyone. So we must address spam on the receiving end. That's exactly what email is doing, in a decentralized way, pretty effectively in my opinion.

Now why are cell carriers dragging their feet even for basic problems like caller ID spoofing, which have been solved in the tech industry for decades now? 10 years ago, if I could have switched to any carrier at all that blocked spoofed calls, I definitely would have. But no company offered that service for the reasons I mentioned, and now it's too late and people have mostly given up on voice calls.

If email were a government-bolstered oligopoly and we all had to rely on Verizon's in-house engineers for spam filtering, email would be good as dead too. Email is certainly not perfect, but overall I think email's open model has aged much better.

> We can never stop people trying to make spam calls, because human nature.

Bit of a tangent, but I don't think people are making these spam calls because "human nature". They're making the calls because we have a society based on the accumulation of fungible wealth through profit, they can make a profit from shilling something through these calls, and the expected negative consequences of doing so aren't significant. Nobody wakes up with the natural urge to talk to hundreds of strangers about refinancing their student loans.

> E-mail is actually a good example of why you shouldn't open up communications systems too much. Because they're more or less free to send, people who want to send advertisements send loads of them. This makes e-mail entirely unusable unless you are very proactive in restricting who can send mail to you. Technical limitations like SPF, DKIM, and so on only prevent the worst abuses. What does really work has been IP blacklisting and reputation systems that more or less make rolling your e-mail very difficult.

Unfortunately the real problem with email is liability. There's no way for me to force liability of a received email onto the sender. I can't tell Gmail to block all non-US email. I can't even tell Gmail to block all mail from specific IP blocks or domains. If malicious email originates from the US then there's some very strict laws around malicious use of computers...

A phone call though? The liability is in the caller or, at least, the service provider.

You're thinking about cellular service. Most of the phone spam I'm aware of is coming from VoIP connections and the reason there's so much of it is it's extremely cheap.

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