Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw8383833jj | Hacker News Reader

I think a much easier way would be if we just taxed phone calls at 1 cent each. I mean absolutely everything else is already taxed: you pay taxes just to stay alive. the least that could be done is add a 1 cent tax to each phone call, just enough to stop the mass phone calling.

View on HN

An online game, Eve Online, let's you set a fee for anyone not in your contacts to message you, with a default fee. You get some of it and "the government" (the game) gets the rest. The first time you message someone, you get prompted to pay the fee or discard your message.

I want this in real life. Set a default of a $1 or so. Your carrier gets $0.25, you get $0.75. You can adjust the fee to $0 or $1000. Carrier gets 25%.

Interesting. Would it work per device or would there be a central repository that stores everyone's contact list?

These calls are already illegal. There is a Do not call list. The gov has just been completely inept at enforcement, I don’t think we need extra tax, just enforce the laws we have.

The point is that, if there is a per-call cost that everybody has to pay, it becomes much harder for spammers to justify automatically calling hundreds of thousands of numbers per day, while regular people who make one or two calls a day won't notice.

"enforcing the laws we have" isn't enough because spoofing exists and many of the spammers operate across borders.

clearly the current model doesn't work well enough. US laws don't stop Nigerian scammers abusing weak telecom systems. Adding a tax paid by the carrier incentivises them to collect it from the upstream chain all the way back to the caller.

Us laws COULD stop these scammers, but the govt has been too scared to actually lock out the carriers that are carrying these spam calls or selling these big blocks of local numbers. It seems like they are starting to play hardball, but we’ll see:

“ The Cox/Jones/Sumco Panama operation appears to be responsible for making more than eight billion unlawful prerecorded message calls to American consumers since at least 2018. The robocalls include prerecorded marketing messages which encouraged consumers to follow prompts to speak with a “warranty specialist” about extending or reinstating their car warranty.

As announced on July 7, the enforcement bureau issued a notice authorizing all voice service providers to cease carrying any traffic originating from the Cox/Jones/Sumco Panama operation consistent with FCC regulations.

At the same time, the Bureau sent cease-and-desist letters to eight voice service provider to warn them to stop carrying this suspicious traffic. The eight service providers have not responded to the letters and so, as provided in the public notice, the bureau is directing all other carriers to refuse to carry this traffic.”

Basically what the FCC decided to do was ID this org, tell the carriers who sell to this org to stop, and if they don’t stop, require other carriers to lock out the carriers who sell to the spammer.

https://www.mykxlg.com/news/national/fcc-targeting-phone-ser...

How many years and millions of dollars does it take for an enforcement action like this? I think a per-call fee that can be cheaply assessed by carriers on callers that renders such spamming unprofitable in the first place is likely to be a far more efficient approach.

Easy solution: The telco automatically credits 75% of the tax to your account. They then attempt to collect 100% of the tax from the caller.

At that point, the free market gets to decide if it's cheaper to eat the cost of the call (remember, each subscriber sets the amount of the tax), or secure their infrastructure.

Yep, and folks could even have a credit of 500 phone calls a month, or whatever a reasonable number would be, so no cost to consumers at all. Instead of a tax, it should be a minimum charge that goes to the carriers. So that they would be incentivized to collect it.

In a world where we pay for stamps, why didn't bulk unsolicited mail go away? This won't work.

That escalated quickly

It's a fair fee though. It pays for my attention as a recipient. It prevents an externality. It's no different than having to deposit a quarter to take a shopping cart, to incentivize you to return it. A tenth of a cent would probably be just as effective btw; the problem is that you can send a million text messages, wasting a million seconds of other people's time assuming they spend an average of 1 second looking at it, all for far less than the value of all that time wasted.

Nobody is talking about TSA, what a non sequitur.

If only we could get paid by ad companies for trying to steal our attention.

Why wouldn't this solve the problem? Phone calls have a real cost, however small it may be, to both the recipient and the carriers. Everyone accepts paying for stamps. What makes paying for calls different, and such an abhorrent idea that we shouldn't even discuss it?

EDIT: Parent comment was replaced with something completely different so my reply makes no longer makes sense, but I'm leaving it unchanged.

In a world where we pay for stamps, why didn't bulk unsolicited mail go away? Why would it work for telephones?

> In a world where we pay for stamps, why didn't bulk unsolicited mail go away? Why would it work for telephones?

Different situation. Bulk mail is not illegal, in fact the USPS subsidizes it. Spam calls ARE illegal. Hopefully phone carriers will not give discounts for explicitly illegal uses of their networks, but we can deal with that later if it happens.

You are right back at the same "distinguishing legal from illegal calls" problem.

The whole point of this scheme is that it treats all callers equally, and works without needing to distinguish legal from illegal calls.

If paying for stamps can't stop junk mail, I don't see how paying for calls could stop cold callers.

Different situation. Bulk mail is not illegal, in fact the USPS subsidizes it. Spam calls ARE illegal.

I think you're saying that the cure described is worse than the disease, and that the bureaucracy to maintain such regulation would expand beyond its original mandate.

I think that's assuming that things always go poorly, and that there is no possible way for it to go well. Sometimes things go well.

How much more junk mail would we get if postage was free? Orders of magnitude more, I imagine.

It doesn't have to go away entirely to be worth making a change. I get probably 100x more email spam than physical mail

Companies have to pay for commercials and billboards, why don't those go away?

Bulk mail is priced to maximize profit to the postal service. Raising the rate 1000% would effectively end bulk mail. Adding a penny cost per spam would be more than a 1000% increase, and would effectively end the spam.

An impractical and difficult to implement idea that would have terrible unintended consequences.

> difficult to implement idea

A lot of carriers has been billing by minute since the dawn of mobile telecom. And it's still in place in many (most?) countries. Only US/Canada/Mexico are used to unlimited phone calls.

A note, though: A prepaid phone in the US makes you pay for both incoming and outgoing calls unless things have changed. A prepaid phone in Norway only charges you for outgoing calls.

Yep, same in Eastern Europe.

I like the idea, but I suspect the companies doing this make enough from the 1 person that falls for their scam that they can afford to spend 1 cent on everyone who doesn't. I don't know what the monetary tipping point would be where this type of scam stops being worth it for scammers, but I suspect it would be high enough that it would be equally prohibitive for actual consumers.

There was a similar proposal (cannot find RFC) to add it to Email protocols. Would cut spam immediately.

It was even more advanced -- Recepient could choose how much sender should pay, and sender could agree to that (or do it non-interactively, i.e. send an email message with "Max-To-Pay" header, same as you can do it currently with international SMS).

Unfortunately, the proposal never got any adoption, because us, email users and providers.

And then after it was implemented we'd get political reasons why it still isn't implemented. No thanks. I also don't want people legally spamming me for a penny.

"Judge in LOCATION blocks new phone tax"

I mean, great, but that's seriously complicated.

Who pays the tax and how are you going to collect? Do you pay to receive a call? (I know this used to be normal practice in the US, but it isn't where I'm located)? If the call begins or ends in a different country, who pays the tax? Would this make calls unaffordable for poor folks - and what about services like google voice? Are some exempt (like non-emergency hospital, school, and police calls?)

Why wouldn't it just be a charge on your phone bill and included in there?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com