"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."
Plenty of those seem to be non-US providers; perhaps their attitude is "Oh, some foreign regulator. Not my problem". But the regulator isn't actually regulating these providers; it's just listing the ones that (claim to) have a mitigation plan, however feeble.
I just meant that someone is going to wake up, and realize that it's their problem, personally.
Or not.
Ah I see. I was just trying to cover my bases to avoid splitting hairs over what compliance desk means and get to the point about these companies probably not being sophisticated enough to comply (or appear to comply).
> I just meant that someone is going to wake up, and realize that it's their problem, personally.
> Or not.
The or not is kind of what concerns me, because this might be the end for a lot of these companies. Rather than just cutting people off, the FCC should take a role kind of like how the Fed does, but for telecom. Take over the carrier, continue operations, assist the legit subscribers with moving onto a compliant carrier and then shut it down. I'm not sure how number portability is affected when a carrier just shuts down, but it might not be pretty.
A lot of people take the "shouldn't have signed up with spammy telco!" stance here as if everyone has the gift of knowing how to vet a carrier. Hopefully not too many people (and ideally no people) get hurt by this sort of enforcement.
I got the impression that a lot of these firms are overseas. E.g., SIA Tet seems to be Latvian. The FCC can't just direct these companies; but they can "advise" (lean on) domestic carriers not to deliver their traffic.
The present telco network is very much operational. We don’t need an extremist response to spam from the FCC that causes making a phone call to acquire ‘aml attributes.
An element of our younger siblings' (Gen Z) entire culture is a fear of/avoidance towards making and taking phone calls. Communication ecosystems have been built and crossed to the other side of the chicken-and-egg/network-effect hump l because POTS is so bad.
The only people left with landlines that lack caller ID and 'suspicious caller' filtering are the elderly, where they're continuously preyed upon by spammers.
A shame, since if there was one thing the landline phone network was, it was reliable - in a way that cable can't even hope to match. Too bad that it got to be reliable for scammers as well.
This isn't the network losing relevance, she's literally still using it. She's just gatekeeping with her contacts.
I'm not saying we don't need to clamp down. But the downside of clamping down too hard is the calls from contacts in her address book not getting connected. That, and HN being littered with stories about people who are--for some random reason--unconnectable due to no fault of their own. That's the natural response if you let the "throw everyone in jail for the most minor infraction" crowd into the building.