The most insane "robocall mitigation plans" that telcos filed with the FCC

This mindset goes back to the AT&T antitrust breakup. It was decided that phone companies would not be allowed to reject each other's traffic, because the larger ILEC's (incumbent local exchange carrier) would find reasons and excuses to cut off the CLEC's. This would be more or less a death penalty to those businesses, and the ILEC's had exactly zero reason to want the CLEC's to exist at all, so there was a lot of fear and rulemaking to prevent this.

Fast forward 30 years and the details have changed, but the mindset is largely the same. The fear is still quite real, and that's why phone spam isn't treated like email spam. If i.e. verizon cuts off incoming calls from a random CLEC in a midwestern state, that business is just over, done, that's that. It would be impossible to restore the business after your customers left, which they would do more or less instantly; there's no court remedy that would fix it. Great pains are taken to ensure that such an action is legitimate.

The rules are oriented around the idea that the ILEC's were evil antitrust actors, and the plucky CLEC's are the competition we need to protect from big ILEC's heavy hand. In a world of spam, that mindset is backward. And that mindset is changing, but because of the reasonable concerns, it's taking longer than we expect.

"Finally, he noted that the FCC might have been hesitant to take an action that could harm customers. "One reason to be hesitant is that it's not just the bad actor network that gets cut off," Feld said. "Any innocent customers get cut off. This really goes against the entire mindset of the FCC. Generally, the FCC is about making sure that networks stay operational and that calls go through."

Basically: if ( in_allowlist() || called_twice_in_a_row() ) { allow_call() } else { respond_with_beep_beep_problem_please_retry_your_call() && hangup() }

...all humans (eg: doctors offices, appointment schedulers/verifiers, etc) are like: "huh, phone system must be f'd up right now" and call right back. All mechanically dialed spammers just $PHONE += 1 and continue dialing. Son kept an eye on the "called twice" and added them to the allowlist (or maybe you could just auto-add if they ever call twice, and then validate / name / prune new entries once a week or so?)

The hope is that it results in some self-reflection for the caller, though it hasn't reduced the number of calls.

One problem with this method is that your burner will still accept incoming calls from any number, so you'd lose caller ID information if you want to make sure only your VOIP server can call you. Of course you can just set it up to send you the caller ID through some other channel - like a text message.

But anyway you can make a really simple lua script that looks at a text file to see if the number is allowed, then forward it to your burner. In FreeSWITCH you just do something like <action application="set" data="allowed=${lua(allowlist.lua)}"/> and act on that variable accordingly. Then you can use whatever command line tool you prefer to add and remove numbers from the file.

If you need some help, drop a burner email and I can reach out.

Why would your SP be able to do something about someone else on another network spoofing your number and calling a random third-party that is also possibly on a different network?

The whole problem here is there is nothing in the legacy phone network to validate that calling party information is accurate (at least, between service providers.)

[1] https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387?hl=en

Here's a DIY solution: https://www.lennytroll.com/

And a $2/month batteries-included solution: https://jollyrogertelephone.com/

That would mitigate nearly ALL robocalls.

I would much rather live in a world where where _real_ messages dominate our channels of communication. A world where I can contact people "out of the blue" without suspicion of scam or fraud.

Yes, it achieves the desired outcome, but it has rather adverse side effects.