The problem I noted at the time is that since we only charged for minutes during the call, the first call - which was dialed and immediately dropped - would never get a charge, only the second would.

I would like everyone that uses a telephone API to be required to register a bond. If they are found abusing the system, they will lose the bond and be banned from using ANY companies telephone system.

That telephony companies do not take the opportunity fix tbe actual problem makes me think a court may be able to find they are complicit.

My point is, there are at least hundreds of providers you can get a voip line from, in addition to the many traditional carriers you could get conventional phone lines from; many of which are not really beholden to the courts of whichever jurisdiction you choose. Getting them all to agree not to provide service to one person is going to be hard; especially with the large networks of reselling resold traffic.

I would love to see some sort of regulation requiring some ability to trace down the origin of calls, though. There should be a way to track back which carriers (and their customers) involved when the recipient would like to press charges against the entity that placed the call (ex: the fraudulent callers from "The Windows" trying to "fix" my computer). There are valid reasons for anonymous calling, so safeguards should be in place, maybe just a star code (feature code) to indicate the last received call was spam, and a caller that generates a large number of reported calls is subject to investigation by the carrier and referral to law enforcement if appropriate.

It may be that the US courts have no jurisdiction over a VOIP provider in Kazakhstan, but there's no reason my phone provider can't simply refuse to route their calls.

But phone operators should do something, like block voicemails left by a robot, either by detecting them automatically, or blacklisting numbers, or, why not, offer the option of a captcha before leaving a message:

in order to leave a message to this person, please enter the result of the following operation: how much is 3 times 4...

Maybe there's an opportunity for a startup here. It could work before the fact with a captcha as above, or after the fact: it would listen to your messages and spam-rate them.

One can easily imagine doing something similar at signup time for postpaid services like Twilio (or any other abusable SaaS, for that matter).

  everyone that uses a telephone API

Strongarming.

>Who is capable of making such a thing possible?

The US.

EDIT: just called my voicemail and the option to direct leave a voice mail for someone else is right on the main menu (Three UK).

I can tell you that's exactly what they are doing.

I assume we're talking about a very narrow window here, right? How narrow?

Is it something that has always existed, or something that crept in because of the transition from phone-as-mechanical-device to phone-as-software?

On a related note, I'm still surprised to find that telephone operators haven't fixed the scenario "someone calls me and I just miss it, I call them back while they're trying to call me for the second time, and we both get a busy signal". As a naive outsider, seems like it wouldn't take much to just connect those two calls.

Much better if dialing out on a line just takes an exclusionary lock on the line so that it can't be dialed into; then anything that forwards back to that line, at any level of indirection, will be told the line is busy and will step to the next part of the call-tree.

(Note that this becomes important when you're trying to e.g. get a [random peer of your support-level] on the line for a consult in tech support, by "adding" to the call the same ring-group you're in. Exclusionary locking here is what ensures that you won't end up adding yourself to the call.

Who would you charge for the call?

Under such a system, this can become a issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_services#Incoming_calls

Europe, Asia, Australia etc all charge the caller.

Also if you ring a phone in the same room as you [we have kids!] you'll often find you get a ring tone long before the callee's phone rings.

Not sure about the US, but in Australia this is a phone specific feature. The Caller ID comes between the first and second ring, so if you want a call blocking feature that is completely silent, you need to silence the first ring of every call. Some phones will do this automatically, others (like my Panasonic landline) make it an option you can turn on & off. The Panasonic FAQ has some info:

http://eng.faq.panasonic.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/26547/~...

[1] We provide enhanced caller ID---a name in addition to the phone number. Our new product will also mark known telemarketers.

[2] The amount of time we have to do what we do

[3] The calling party---the one initiating the phone call.

[4] which may be enough to identify the carrier we work with.

I'd have thought on the basis that a telephone call involves two parties in simultaneous communication, the caller and callee, and that a voicemail box isn't a party when a message is being left; the recipient collecting the mail does so of their own volition; the communication is not a phone call, it's asynchronous.

Whether that will wash probably depends on caselaw that I have no knowledge of.

I mean- they could just bill for that. Like, offer a product that would send a voicemail message directly. Evil but I would not put it past a cell carrier.

Because if not, I need to disable my voicemail.

If you have one of the carriers others have mentioned, they are calling your voicemail directly, completely bypassing your phone.

Edit: clarified.

but the issue is randomly calling ppl. not the call itself. at least in germany random/cold calls are forbidden so you can only call people who agreed to it prior.