They are not unable, they are unwilling.

Before 2019, they were hesitant to do so over uncertainty as to whether it would be a violation of common carrier laws to do so. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-robocalls/fcc-set-to-...

Okay, and in the three years since then, have they made any progress? If not, why am I wrong if I think they may have just been using that as an excuse?

They have implemented the shake and stir protocol in the US.

Easy solution where that's not an issue.

Add an abuse button to the phone.

Every call costs a dollar to connect, no matter where it comes from - another carrier or international or whatever.

You get the dollar back if the receiver doesn't press the abuse button.

The dollar can be waived if the company knows the call is coming from an individual household with low call volume.

I do want to clarify that the phone companies making money from robocalls are not YOUR phone company. Phone companies that provide services to consumers lose money from robocalls, have to deal with unsatisfied customers, and really want both a technological and legal solution. The problem is a vast array of VoIP providers that let anyone with a valid credit card sign up and start pumping calls in real time. To them the revenue loss from people sometimes signing up with a stolen card and sending a bunch of scam calls is much smaller than that gained from having a low barrier for signup.

Unfortunately, at this point the solution is to play hardball and say "start either vetting your customers better or providing us with accurate uuids so we can block/report them for you, otherwise we will no longer route calls originating from your voip service".

Perhaps even connect the call to a automated message that says, "we're sorry, <voip telco> has had its services disconnected for fraud. Goodbye"

But US phone companies don't want to do that because of the potential revenue loss.

That's the path the FCC is going down, with starting to implement "Know Your Customer" rules similar to banks that require them to gather enough information to prevent easily setting up fake accounts.

Starting to implement? They promised a fix like 2 years ago. I have about as much faith in the FCC accomplishing anything significant as I do in buying an extended auto warranty from a random caller.

I mean we were starting from a system that was basically e-mail, except where providers were required to deliver all messages without any discrimination or filtering. They had to create a new framework that allowed for carriers to choose not to deliver calls, interoperable technology to authenticate calls, and now close loopholes that are still allowing bad actors access to the phone network. It's a fundamental rearchitecting of how the phone network works that requires every single operator to make upgrades, so yeah it's going to take some time. And you're not really going to see much progress until it's nearly finished because if 90% of the network is secure you'll just see the same volume of crap through the remaining 10%.

That date has already passed and it is still a serious issue. Not to mention the billions we handed out to telecom companies to assist with upgrades that they just pocketed.

You don't need to go all orwellian though. Just charge a security fee that makes spamming or scamming unprofitable for every call and add a simple way for the recipient to mark calls as wanted or unwanted.

Wanted calls get a refund.

> Unfortunately, at this point the solution is to play hardball and say "start either vetting your customers better or providing us with accurate uuids so we can block/report them for you, otherwise we will no longer route calls originating from your voip service".

Then this becomes a backdoor way for the bigger players to discriminate against new, smaller players that are otherwise legit and doing their best to keep spammers/scammers off of their network.

The absence of these problems in a big part of the world will tell you the problem is not, and never has been, technical. It's a political problem, or rather the problem with the leadership of US telcos.

That's fine, then the offenders would be the robocallers and the issue can be solved by targeting the robocallers. If it isn't being solved it's probably because they don't want to solve it.

E-mail spammers went to jail, I don't see why robocallers don't go to jail. It's way easier to locate them anyway. If we can fight spam mail, spam calls can be dealt with too.

We didn't solve e-mail spam by jailing people.

We didn’t solve e-mail spam

Unless you mean 'so we should jail more of them', GP's making the same point. (Not 'I didn't get where I am today by' tone as I initially read it and suspect you may have.)

No, not suggesting jail, just lamenting I get daily spam through my gmail and other email accounts. Not to mention the recruiter spam that would be basically impossible to stop.

Robocalling seems like a much more tractable problem to solve though.

I believe email spam and Robocalling should both be subject to harsh punishments, even more so if it is sexually explicit spam being sent to minors.

If you murder someone, you go away. If you rob 100 million people of 0.00001% of their life, you just did the equivalent of 100 murders. Seems no less criminal to me - in fact more so.

Seems pretty solved to me, at least for hard spam. The soft spam of useless marketing messages from companies that do have a legitimate reason to have my contact info is a harder problem.

We actually did. My gmail get's none

But gmail accomplished that by refusing to deliver legitimate mail too. It's worse than the spam floods we used to have.

My gmail regularly gets spam

Sure, yet I'm quite happy to see some jailed spammers :)

The point is, we are not hopeless. Actually, the e-mail thing was and is quite more problematic with accusations of gatekeepers(domain blacklists) asking for money but at least you know what's happening an how to solve it.

You're happy to see people go to jail for sending spam? This seems crazy from my perspective. It seems to me like a minor offense that wouldn't require jail time (and where jail would be counterproductive).

Of course if you are actually talking about scammers then I can understand your perspective, even if I'm not sure I would agree either.

I don't see it as a minor offence at all, spam distracts me and breaks my flow and spends my cognitive energy and as a result makes me underperform. I like putting all my attention to the stuff I'm engaged with and it makes me very angry when interrupted with something irrelevant. I do often try to track back spam calls or spam mails to make sure that I'm an expensive target.

Some people can be better at dealing with that kind of annoyances, good for them.

You want to send to jail everyone who distracts you and breaks your flow ? This seems extreme to me. Maybe you can take less extreme actions to avoid this, like putting your devices in "do not disturb" mode while you need to work.

No, I don't want to send everyone who distracts me to jail. When someone distracts me in person I tell them to come back later, no jail time imposed. Someone sends me an e-mail about something but I'm not interested? No problem, I'll tell them thanks but no thanks. Call me for feedback on your product I purchased last month? No problem, if I'm available I will talk to you and if I'm not I will ask you to call later - no jail time required. You want to sell me an upgrade to my plan? OK, let me hear it now if I'm available or call me back in few hours of this is not a good time - jail free.

On the other hand, I would like strong punishment for people who make inconsiderate noise(bikes, prayers, street vendors) or directly reach me without addressing me directly(spam mails, robocalls). The problem with those is that they saturate my attention without having anything for me in it. It is very cheap for them and very expensive for me. That's why I try to make it expensive for them too, usually by engaging with them and making it unpleasant and unprofitable conversation and even making them spend money on stuff like shipping only to have it returned.

For those, jail is the civil alternative. I would be completely fine with anything more brutal, I have no sympathy. How can I have sympathy when their engagement is not a human one, its automated impersonal engagement designed to drain my time and resources for their gain.

Excessive punishment for minor infractions is a hallmark of an authoritarian police state, where the government selectively enforces laws in order to jail people it doesn't like.

I don't want to live in that society. I, too, get very annoyed when there's an unreasonable amount of outside noise encroaching into my private space, but the right way to fix that is to address the societal ills that cause people to engage in antisocial behavior. Yes, that's a lot harder than just throwing everyone in jail, but that is the only way you're going to create a healthy society.

It's alright, I don't have any juridicial power. I simply desire their demise(slow and painful one). In case I acquire some, we can discuss what's the proper punishment for spammers.

I'm assuming they are thinking more about fraudulent spam, Nigerian prince's and fake goods and the like, rather than just advertisements for real products spam

Spam is literally attacking communication infrastructure and stealing money. It is a form of cyberterrorism. Not to mention the sexual spam that is sent to minors non-stop. The fact that you think that is like speeding is messed up.

Isn't sending porn to minors already illegal? That should definitely be illegal, but I don't see why all spam needs to be criminalized to the level of cyberterrorism.

Scams are already illegal under anti-fraud laws.

Why should spam that isn't already criminalized (fraud/illegal porn distribution) be treated as a significant crime?

Take 1 life, go to jail. Take .00001% of 100 million lives, go to jail. Seems logical & fair & socially constructive to me, like justice should.

Because the only way to stop it would be at a federal level. If it originates on domestic soil and is traceable, then it could be a states issue with civil punishment, but most spam comes from overseas and the most effective solution would be to treat it as a serious foreign affairs issues and start heavily sanctioning countries that can't get it under control.

They could have used any spam filters they might have written to simply flat numbers so their customers could decide what to do for themselves. Instead we have to rely on third party services (and thus share private information with those parties).

Why doesn't iOS support "Send straight to voicemail any caller not any my address book" ?

Settings -> Phone -> Silence Unknown Callers.

It allows callbacks from numbers you’ve called recently which is nice.

For texts there’s “Filter Unknown Senders”

Go to Settings > Focus > Do Not Disturb > move the toggle next to Do Not Disturb > to ON position and tap on the People tab.