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Comment by pocksuppet | Hacker News Reader

Number spoofing is not a solved problem because some carriers, which appear legitimate in all other respects, make a business out of routing your traffic over TDM trunks that don't support caller ID verification, and will claim it's extremely expensive to upgrade these to VOIP.

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Fuck 'em? That's not a insurmountable problem in the slightest. Google or Apple could probably solve this problem themselves by simply not ringing the phone for any call that doesn't meet ID verification.

The behavior of the phone network is set by government regulation. If you refuse to service allowable calls, you are heavily fined or kicked off the network. The government has to update the rules.

I tried to find these rules yesterday (for another comment chain) but couldn't. As far as I could tell, nothing stops the carrier from silently dropping a likely scam call without receiver's knowledge or consent. Do you know which specific regulations would prohibit that?

I'd be 100% happy to block those carriers from calling me. Their users should just get a message that calling my number is not supported and they should try calling me from another device.

Not allowed. The same government rules that stop Google from refusing calls from Apple devices also stop them from refusing calls from whoever is doing this. The government would have to update the rules. They could mandate number verification for all calls, even those passing over TDM trunks, and make it the network's problem to figure out how to do that. The rules currently say that all calls which don't pass through legacy equipment must have verified numbers, so there's a market for making calls take stupid legacy routes on purpose.

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