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Comment by tlogan | Hacker News Reader

The main problem and challenge with all these regulations is enforcement. How are they actually going to enforce them?

The U.S. already has very strict rules against unsolicited calls, yet I still get around 20 spam calls a day saying things like "press 2 to be connected" or offering some "$64K loan."

At the same time, I have not received a single unsolicited call from a reputable company.

The same is true for text messages. In 2023, the U.S. introduced stricter regulations, and companies like Twilio responded with very strict anti-spam rules. The rules are now so restrictive that we are forced to stopped using Twilio for text important notification to our my own team.

Yet I still receive dozens of spam text messages every week.

So the question is whether the regulations can actually be enforced against the people who are already ignoring them.

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> I have not received a single unsolicited call from a reputable company.

Yet you receive 20 spam calls a day through a known company, namely your phone provider. The way to solve this is to forcibly draft the providers into this; for example: any time you receive a spam call, you can dial a special *# number after hanging up. This message will have the effect of crediting $5 on your next phone bill, and allows the provider to recoup that loss from the originating provider, etc, all the way to the caller itself. The first company in the chain not cooperating in this scheme is out $5 per spam call through their network.

Of course, something like this needs the usual protection against abuse, but that's equally manageable.

Yes, this.

The backtrack chain of accountability has to apply to each telco transiting a given call. We can argue about how much that penalty should be (I'd prefer a heftier one), and details over how to address abuse and whatnot.

I'd detailed a version of this a few days ago here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49129679>.

California has (recently?) introduced a bonding requirement of telemarketers. I'd like to see a far stiffer bonding obligation to telecoms providers, probably in the deca-to-mega millions amounts.

As that's bonding, the rate is based on risk (business assessment plus history), and would likely be a small fraction of the total amount for legitimate providers, but would be substantial for bad-actors, and the Surety (bond provider) would be strongly incentivised to limit their risk through bad behaviour on the part of the Principal (bonded entity).

Have an LLM listen in on all the calls and automatically flag unsolicited calls?

That’s a terrible idea. Just think about privacy, pollution, cost.

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