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Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

That's only because we let that system be gamed. It doesn't have to be that way. Telcos always know who they're billing for a call; they have the capability to make caller ID reliable.

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That's not true. Phone companies have to pay fees when they have to pass a phone call through their telco to another. They have entire routing table fees involved and the telcos will pass traffic through the cheapest routes. That's why a call route can go through one set of routing in the morning but by the evening it can go a completely different way, it's cheaper the second time around. The fees are constantly changing. From a receiving telco side, they receive an incoming call that's identified themselves as Telco1, which matches the routing tables. The problem is the telcos rely on an honor system when they self identify.(I don't know when this started, it was in place when I worked in telco and everyone I knew at retirement age said it had always been that way for them.) And then we have telcos that go even further and completely avoid identification altogether. Which is sleazy but happens very often. The incoming telcos then are faced with either denying the incoming calls altogether (but then it's the callers that suffer -but it would force the telco trying to pass traffic for free, to either identify themselves or find another route) or risking passing that traffic and not being paid for it. If it's low enough traffic, it's probably easier just to let the calls through without knowing who to charge, so that telco got their calls passed for free. It was a constant game for us to deny traffic and keeping up with the routing tables.

tldr: The technology isn't the only thing that's over 100 years old, the business practices are also extremely broken too. And telcos are not an honest bunch.

A good handful of the larger telcos don't bother with least cost routing tables, and will instead just send all their domestic traffic straight through their own networks. The route quality tends to be much higher when they do that.

I don't think you've seen the systems they use in developing countries. Phone networks are almost a century behind the internet. It's not something that's easy to fix, nor are there too many situations where you would need to rely on the CID to identify the caller.

You're still using the circular logic of insisting that caller ID can't be trusted because it shouldn't be trusted because it can't be trusted. I and most people who want to not get robocalls want a caller ID system that is trustworthy, and the first-world telcos we're doing business with are totally capable of providing a service that is at least partly trustworthy. I'm not interested in receiving calls from third-world countries and would be perfectly happy only getting calls from those using providers that provide for trustworthy caller ID, but nobody's even offering to sell me such a service.

You're not talking about Caller IDs here though, you're talking about some completely new technology that'd require a complete rework of current telephony systems.

If you're worried about someone spoofing the source of their call you should probably consider using SIP over TCP, although it is unlikely that rest of the world is going to follow suit any time soon.

And no, first-world telcos wouldn't be capable of providing what you want without massive overhauls either... Nor would they want to since there's a plenty of business critical applications that depend on this behavior.

Caller ID is what describes what I want, and the current methods for delivering caller ID info to the recipient of a call would not need to change. The telcos may have to invent a new term for how they handle things behind the scenes, but it would be transparent to me except that I'd now have a way to stop the robocalls.

I highly doubt that it would be hard for telcos to implement such a system. I have no doubt that they don't want to, as evidenced by their decision not to in the face of strong demand. I can certainly understand that they might have lots of businesses interested in preventing such a change, but I'm not aware of how legitimate businesses would be harmed. All they need to do is ensure that when they call me they deliver caller ID information that corresponds to a real number that can be used to identify them to the FTC when I file my complaints.

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