FCC fines robocaller a record $300M after blocking billions of their scam calls

The phone companies also owe me nothing, and they provide a worse experience and will likely continue to do so unless forced by the FCC (which seems to be getting better lately).

I do use SMS/MMS but forwarded to my web browser so I don't have to look at my phone.

At the moment, Messenger is better for both text and voice/video calls. If that changes, my friends and I will adapt.

I've had plenty of obnoxious salespeople and other solicitors, especially religious ones. They even have the nerve to claim that they aren't soliciting because they're not selling anything for money. And none of them have the good sense to accept that they're bothering someone that is obviously not happy that their door was knocked on.

Unless I'm already in a really bad mood, I generally start off nice, but I turn serious as soon as they refuse to take the first 'no'. Except for the ones I argue with for a while to waste their time and energy.

I have my other communication (mostly FB Messenger, but also Discord and SMS/MMS) set up to work on my computer, so I rarely look at my phone at home.

Also I live in a condo, nobody can really "knock on my door" unless it's someone who lives in my building, in which case I'll answer.

My thought is that you knocking on my door does not oblige me to stop what I'm doing and answer it, any more than someone saying, "sir, do you have a minute for..." while I'm walking down the street obliges me to stop and hear their sales pitch, or seeing an unknown caller on the phone means I ought to pick it up.

At most, this "consideration" would extend to a handful of people. In reality, no, most people would not care to mark calls as legitimate, even from friends.

> For other callers, like businesses, if the recipient does not mark the call as legitimate, they have the option to discontinue offering calls to that customer in the future or absorb the associated cost.

Yes, it would just be part of the cost of doing business. It would be a tax on all phone calls. No one would mark these calls as legit.

> This way, the system encourages genuine calls while discouraging misuse of the service.

Again, the incentives aren't aligned. It would not work.

If you had proposed the opposite, your idea would have a much greater chance of working, but you didn't. If more than a handful of people mark a particular number as having called them illegitimately, then yes, fine that number a large sum of money. That would work. People are incentivized to complain when they receive spam calls and texts. People are not incentivized to confirm that normal calls are normal.

Imagine applying this idea to credit card fraud instead of phone calls, so you had to mark every single credit card transaction as legitimate, or else the business gets charged an extra 10 cents. The customer faces no consequences for "forgetting" to mark the charges as legitimate. The people who empathize enough with the business to do that for every single charge would just be faced with a major hassle, and the credit card companies would have a null signal where most "illegitimate" (by default) charges are actually legitimate. People can already contest illegitimate credit card charges, and that system works much better than a default-illegitimate system.

There is still a strong predatory incentive for people with limited choices. Who wants to guess, for example, what cheque-cashing establishments will do? Or asshat landlords?

I also participate in a lot of local groups where the least common denominator is usually phone/SMS for quick comms.

I refuse to use Meta products outside a privacy container on my computer so no Facebook Messenger/WhatsApp on my phone.

How the hell am I proving your point when I say I use my personal (don't have any other) phone for nothing but calls and the occasional SMS?

See the restaurant reservation demo from Google IO 2018.

The issue is getting 10 completely silent calls per day, sometimes with an additional "your car warranty is expired" call. That's the issue everyone has a problem with - it's made answering your phone nearly useless.

I think you are missing the big picture.

Assuming that we waste 1 minute of time for 90 people, and everything else is productive, it’s:

- 90 minutes of aggregate inefficiency…

- to benefit 7 folks who have a much better understanding of the market for their current and future needs…

- and 3 people who are scaling their business for years via delegating something they are not good at to folks who are.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had many many dud 90-minute encounters (much less one minute encounters) that were all worth it for the one encounter that moved the needle. This could be sales leads, training, dates, finding new restaurants… there are many domains for which this is true.

Frankly, I think that this is a fairly efficient ratio compared to most value-seeking activities in the world.

Edit: Note that the close rate was close to 40% live (versus 10% calls) with a non-significant n, so I think the medium itself was one source of inefficiency. The product was clearly needed by our leads, but trust-building was tougher over the phone.

But instead, the phone companies probably decided they could make extra cash off the robocallers, not realizing they were killing the golden goose. I'm also 100% certain that both phone companies and members of Congress received bribes i mean sizeable campaign contributions and cushy think tank jobs over this.

So maybe 50-100 people made money, and absolutely ruined a working communication system. I hope it was worth inconveniencing the entire US population to make a little money, you shameless wieners.

It’s more likely that they find a good match with about 2% of them, and those 2% help grow their business.

I really get the sense that the people complaining the most about cold calling (different than robo-calling) are folks who:

- have little or no business experience

- have never had a good sales experience

- work in tech where the default sales experience sucks

Successful business people know what their hair-on-fire problems are, and they are willing to take on speculative engagements that may help them solve those problems. This is not rocket science.

I mean, that’s easy to say in a glib way on a site like HN, but are factoring in the full consequences of the knock-on effects of a high-friction economy?

Oh, ads are annoying? Ok, everything that is ad supported ceases to exist. Little or no TV, no social media (ok, this sort of seems like a win), no newspapers, no magazines, no radio, much smaller movie scene (since they can’t advertise), etc.

I’m all for having healthy boundaries and being able to set healthy boundaries, but your solution seems like overkill.

Fwiw, I set my phone on do not disturb for numbers not in my address book. That’s an easy way to not be bothered if that’s your jam (I just check messages if/when I want to).

> You, and those like you, are the reason we can't have nice things.

Cheers.

I love you, too.

I will be sure to remember your kind words when my customers thank me for doing such a good job (which is typical and often).

It is difficult enough that there is a full on coalition dedicated to this (the trace back working group that’s mentioned by the fcc in this order)

Second, telcos do not necessarily know the origin of calls. Virtually all spam/scam calls originate from the internet via a VoIP gateway. There are numerous VoIP gateways, they often obtain their traffic from yet other VoIP gateways, and they often introduce traffic into the US PSTN through a foreign telco. At each of these steps, the origin of the call is usually lost. Telephone circuits are always established in the "forward" direction and there is no need for reverse routing information, so historically it was never provided. At the extreme, some calls are introduced into the TDM telephone system by boxes with multiple SIM cards that relay calls from IP to a cellular carrier (this is not very common in the US because cellular carriers aggressively monitor for it, but it's very common in for example Africa---where this method is often used to carry legitimate traffic at a cost savings!). All of this means that tracing the origin of calls can be surprisingly complex, which is why USTelecom (an industry association) funds a consortium to perform tracing for the FCC.

The underlying reason is simple: nothing in the telephone system requires calls to identify their origin. There are two (and in many cases more) different concepts of "originating number" on a telephone call, CID and ANI, and neither are required or even expected to correspond to the origin point of the call. The purpose of STIR/SHAKEN is to introduce such a requirement for the first time, standardizing a header (in the case of VoIP) or SS7 message (in the case of TDM) that declares the carrier with which a call originated. This will vastly simplify tracing and blocking of calls from problematic carriers, which is the motivation behind the mandatory rollout that is currently in progress. One of the broader goals of the STIR/SHAKEN program is to introduce a degree of liability at all points in the process, as every carrier is responsible for ensuring appropriate attestations on calls they hand off to customers. This seems to be having a positive impact, although as with most spam mitigation efforts, it does have the downside of making it more expensive and complex to get access to the telephone network, mostly to the financial advantage of Twilio.