I totally see that. But on the flip side we see utilities like phone companies unable to block abusive robocalls and scammers.
(My thoughts are my own, and they are rarely well-formed)
Add an abuse button to the phone.
Every call costs a dollar to connect, no matter where it comes from - another carrier or international or whatever.
You get the dollar back if the receiver doesn't press the abuse button.
The dollar can be waived if the company knows the call is coming from an individual household with low call volume.
Perhaps even connect the call to a automated message that says, "we're sorry, <voip telco> has had its services disconnected for fraud. Goodbye"
But US phone companies don't want to do that because of the potential revenue loss.
Then this becomes a backdoor way for the bigger players to discriminate against new, smaller players that are otherwise legit and doing their best to keep spammers/scammers off of their network.
Wanted calls get a refund.
E-mail spammers went to jail, I don't see why robocallers don't go to jail. It's way easier to locate them anyway. If we can fight spam mail, spam calls can be dealt with too.
The point is, we are not hopeless. Actually, the e-mail thing was and is quite more problematic with accusations of gatekeepers(domain blacklists) asking for money but at least you know what's happening an how to solve it.
Of course if you are actually talking about scammers then I can understand your perspective, even if I'm not sure I would agree either.
Some people can be better at dealing with that kind of annoyances, good for them.
On the other hand, I would like strong punishment for people who make inconsiderate noise(bikes, prayers, street vendors) or directly reach me without addressing me directly(spam mails, robocalls). The problem with those is that they saturate my attention without having anything for me in it. It is very cheap for them and very expensive for me. That's why I try to make it expensive for them too, usually by engaging with them and making it unpleasant and unprofitable conversation and even making them spend money on stuff like shipping only to have it returned.
For those, jail is the civil alternative. I would be completely fine with anything more brutal, I have no sympathy. How can I have sympathy when their engagement is not a human one, its automated impersonal engagement designed to drain my time and resources for their gain.
I don't want to live in that society. I, too, get very annoyed when there's an unreasonable amount of outside noise encroaching into my private space, but the right way to fix that is to address the societal ills that cause people to engage in antisocial behavior. Yes, that's a lot harder than just throwing everyone in jail, but that is the only way you're going to create a healthy society.
Scams are already illegal under anti-fraud laws.
Why should spam that isn't already criminalized (fraud/illegal porn distribution) be treated as a significant crime?
Robocalling seems like a much more tractable problem to solve though.
It allows callbacks from numbers you’ve called recently which is nice.
For texts there’s “Filter Unknown Senders”