I wonder why this is such a large problem in the US.
Here in Germany i don't even remember the last time i got a robocall (if ever).
This is %100 a North American problem.
In the US, the person receiving the call / text pays for the airtime to the cell phone. So sending out a million text messages costs almost nothing, because the expensive part is borne by the receivers.
In the UK and EU, the person sending the call / text pays for the airtime to the cell phone. This price is defined by a government regulator is owed by the sender's network to the owner of the cell tower.
So if some random person sends a text to me, and I'm using an O2 tower, that person has to pay O2 something like £0.20; meaning to send a million text messages would cost you £200k.
The result is that I do get spam messages, but they're always far more directed: normally organizations that I've actually interacted with in the past. Sending a message to a thousand previous customers is a lot more cost-effective (I presume) than sending a message to tens of millions of random phone numbers.
Ironically, the absolute easiest way to solve the US's spam call/text problem is actually market-based: make the caller pay for the entire path of the call, all the way to the receiver.
Except few of us actually do. Most plans are unlimited for calls and texts at least. If there's a limit, it's on data.
> The result is that I do get spam messages
Ah, but I'm in the US and I don't get any spam texts :). I do get some robocalls though. It's not an easy to solve problem.
> make the caller pay for the entire path of the call, all the way to the receiver
I think the complication here is that the source of the calls and texts are not other mobile phones. They're coming onto the network via SIP. The billing mechanism to bill all the way back to the sender might be impossible with the current technologies being used. I can send an email to make a text appear on my phone, and this is a feature I have used occasionally -- how do I bill for that?
Whether you pay per-SMS or whether you pay bulk for "unlimited" calls and texts, you're still paying for the path from the tower to your phone. Calling a cell phone in the US is the same price as calling a landline.
In the UK, it's possible to buy a phone that has no outgoing minutes or texts. This is useful because people can still call you. In fact, at some point there was a provider that would pay you a "cut" on every SMS or phone call you received. And calling a mobile phone -- whether you're calling from a landline or another mobile phone -- is more expensive than calling a landline.
Which is almost certainly one of the key problems with implementing such a system in the US: in the UK and Europe, mobile phone numbers look obviously different than landline numbers, so you know ahead of time that the call is going to cost you more. In the US, they look the same, so you'd never know how much you would get charged.
> The billing mechanism to bill all the way back to the sender might be impossible with the current technologies being used
If you call my mobile phone, my mobile operator will be paid for that call one way or another; I'm pretty sure neither they nor any of the companies in between your phone provider and mine are going to give it away for free out of the goodness of their hearts. Which means the charge-back mechanism is already in place; it's just not used in the US.
That's how weird this phenomenon is to a european. To me it was a solid "WTF?" moment. Since then I've wondered why I've never heard about US:ians tracking down these operations and destroying them.
Do you really see that happening? "America Bad" is the dominant theme online, including on HN. I see -way- more "gosh I don't understand why America sucks so bad, it's totally perfect over here in Europe" than I see Americans claiming that the US is automatically superior. I feel like in the US we're playing defense way more often, trying to explain misunderstandings and ignorance about how things work here.
To be clear, there are definitely things that work better in Europe. But there are things that the US does pretty well too. Nobody likes to hear that.
Similarly, I understand it is free to send SMS in the states, you pay to receive them. Again this is a cost in the UK - though with a headless mobile phone and a SIM with 'unlimited sms' this can be worked around, though the SIM need to be rotated.
Robo calls make sense in the US in part because we used the phone more (remember historic), and in part because "everyone" spoke English and so you could ignore language and reach a lot more people.
> Again this is a cost in the UK - though with a headless mobile phone and a SIM with 'unlimited sms' this can be worked around, though the SIM need to be rotated.
The 2 scenarios seem to be:
1) SMS is included in the service. This makes sense. Original SMS were 0-cost to provide; they rode on existing control traffic.
2) Honest people pay per SMS. Spammers don't. As ever, this disproportionately effects honest poor people.
That has not been true in many years. Most people have unlimited everything. Cost conscious consumers do opt for plans with limits, but that's on data, not calls and/or SMS.
Anyway, Britain and (as far as I know) Ireland also don't suffer from these robocalls.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...
I don't have data to compare between the many countries, but anecdotally, Canadians suffer robocalls at a similar rate to US-ians.
Unless this gets regulated Telcos will continue to enjoy their profits.
"At the Federal Communications Committee, the loudest voices come from the telecommunications operators. There’s an imbalance in the control that the consumer ultimately has over who gets to invade their telephone versus these other interests."