Also, why do I seem to always get spam from a few providers? And why aren't we holding them accountable?
If you're a carrier, it pays to terminate all calls -- spam or not -- by delivering them to your actual customer. You get paid by the originating carrier, and in a lot of cases you also get to charge your customer per-minute fees (or use up their prepaid minutes).
This is the norm for standard carriers in Europe too.
> Signed traffic between Tier-1 carriers increased to 85% in 2023
We're getting there, just not soon enough. The whole world will have transitioned to never answering their phone before this actually is fully enforced.
(What makes me sad is that I mostly use Google Voice; and that blocks spam pretty well. But people can still call my actual mobile number by guessing it, and they do.)
Google Voice has gotten somewhat difficult recently because some API-to-SMS services consider it "VOIP", and so they flat-out refuse to send text messages. Some places do this on purpose (Discord won't let me use it for 2FA because 2FA is really their anti-spam mechanism, not a security feature), and some places do it by accident (I couldn't add my Fidelity FSA debit card to Apple Pay because it simply won't send the verification code to my number on file). So some people have my "real" phone number now and it makes me sad, but that's why they call it the Internet Of Shit. (I don't even WANT SMS 2FA. Less secure than making your password 1234. Harder to use than a Nomad. Please let me use my Yubikey or a Passkey.)