A politician's job is to stay in power and work towards their reelection, not make your life better. In some cases those goals to align but that's merely coincidence and should not be taken for granted.
In this case, effective anti-robocall legislation would also work against their own interests.
Say what you will, the 27th Amendment passed. (IE: makes it constitutionally illegal for Representatives to give themselves payraises immediately. They have to give pay-raises for the _next_ congress, which means it may give a pay-raise to the opponent if they lose the election).
Politicians do, and have, been forced by the people to make bad choices for themselves for the good of the country. And its not like its an easy thing to pass a Constitutional Amendment like the 27th.
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We also used to have very strong laws with regards to campaign finance. It was actually our judges who took those laws away in the Citizen's United case.
But our politicians actually put those laws into place to allow the people to trust them more during campaign finance season.
Etc. etc. Plenty of examples. All we need is to convince enough people that a particular law is a good idea, and then that law will happen.
Sure, but the Congress that approved it never felt its consequences because it took another 200 years for it to become ratified. So the first group it affected was definitely not the same group that voted for it.
Besides there is an automatic annual hike that is self-implementing and doesn't need a vote. It requires a vote to block the hike, lol.
Explain the Martha Wright-Reed Just Reasonable Communications Act of 2022 Consent.
It passed the house with unanimous consent, had bi-partisan support in the senate, and Biden signed it.
The main feature is that it caps prison phone call costs.
This helps inmates and hurts companies. So explain to me how this slots into your view
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/01/1146370950/prison-phone-call-...
This is one of many problems where the profits are concentrated among a few players highly motivated to preserve their existence, at the expense of annoyance among vast numbers of people but not to the degree that they act.
And political communications are exempt from CAN-SPAM
Police tend to spend a lot less time on misdemeanors for obvious reasons, so makes sense why funding wouldn't impact that much.
But then companies would stick consent in every form license on the internet. So you'd need some kind of cookie banners that require you to give consent explicitly. But then you might miss the box you actually wanted to check opting in to appointment reminders from your doctor and then miss your appointment. So maybe we allow default opt in under some byzantine circumstances that require everyone to hire a lawyer to understand which also has the effect of exempting political donors so that everyone can continue to be inundated with calls.
What was the downside of letting people set inbound fees again?
Robocallers might then refuse the call if there is any fee at all, which is great, and then if you get the one from your doctor's office you see it in the call log and can exempt the number for next time.
It doesn't happen to anyone who regularly calls you because you've exempted them but it handles the case of someone you know calling from an unusual number with something important, because they just pay the pittance. But spammers can't afford to do that at scale, and if they can you can raise it to $0.25.
[...]
> It doesn't happen to anyone who regularly calls you because you've exempted them
Yes, this sounds like an elaborate game and putting unnecessary burden on me.
And how would a consent law help anyway? Many of these calls are literally scams. They're already illegal and the problem is a lack of enforcement.
Various fixes are underway but today you have to make that personal trade off.
Because they want to. The burden of evidence is on the side trying to restrict what others do.
Robocalls are a weird bill to die on, but this kind of “just ban it” mindset creates a lot of invisible loss in our world.
Better is to let people put a price on the externality and let the market figure out the rest.
Just to note: we do get appointment reminders here.
Such as?
> Better is to let people put a price on the externality and let the market figure out the rest.
How is that better than just requiring these callers to get your consent first?
The reason it happens so much more in the U.S. more than other countries is the ease of exfiltrating money from an enviroment were on average you can get a wealthy target (relatively, even if someone is living paycheck to paycheck if they're paying $4000 in rent it's a pretty big paycheck worth targeting). If the U.S. starts to get on top of spam calling there's a very real chance that the countries it doesn't happen often in will 'enjoy' a similar level of spam as established scammers retarget their efforts.
The good news is the US telcos are forced to do a lot of the heavy lifting in forcing foreign telcos they connect with to begin using SHAKEN/STIR protocols. This means that other countries (which are in just as bad a technical position as the US) will be able to pass similar regulation on their telcos without having to worry about accidentally forcing them to cut off entire other countries as most legitimate telcos will have cut their teeth while dealing with the US telcos.
In the US, mobile phones share their area codes with landlines, and it's the person with the mobile phone who pays for the "airtime" of their incoming (these days it's basically free so you can't tell, but historically it was much more expensive)
In the rest of the world, mobile phones have their own special area codes that are charged to a higher rate to the person who is making the call, and incoming calls are free for the mobile subscriber.
If you look at the pricing plans for VoIP providers, calling a mobile phone can be up to 10x more expensive than a landline (e.g. I'm seeing for France a landline is 4c/min, a mobile is 17c/min on RingCentral). But calling a US phone of any kind is often even completely free.
No… that isn’t why. Where I live both are rated the same which is to say, essentially free. We still don’t get this.
I’ll tell you what it actually is: American exceptionalism. Again we’re talking about a country so allergic to regulation that some poster above was talking about inbound fees. Yeah no, here we just regulate, and it works, and I’ve never had to think about it. Maybe just copy the working examples instead of being so dead set that it Won’t Work For Your Country.
I believe Swiss domestic calls are an order of magnitude more expensive than American calls.
This is the internet equivalent of “don’t judge a book by its cover (or a website by its tld)” :)
(I live in Belgium)
Doing some quick googling I found this -
> The research also estimates the average person now receives 6.04 nuisance calls every month, while 56% of people receive nuisance calls every single week, and 83% of people receive at least one nuisance call a month.
https://telecoms.com/518505/britons-will-receive-4-billion-s...
(I know about the scam calls to old people in Japan being a thing. Having a cell phone probably removes me as a mark)
But I have yet to see dedicated police forces.
Probably negotiating with India behind closed doors to shut down the scam callcenters, but as a recent scambaiter video (I think it was Jim Browning) showed, corruption in their police is endemic and callcenter operators still get warnings before raids. The profit these centers can make is utterly insane, and so they can afford a lot of bribes.
> Why the hell hasn't the FCC nuked these companies' ability to operate?
SS7 is an international system with seriously lax access controls, it's many decades old and as a result it's extremely difficult to get everyone to upgrade their systems - you don't want to cut off entire countries, particularly poor ones, from international telephony, the fallout would be catastrophic.
It's time to hold bad actors accountable. Unfortunately, the cost of doing so would put way too much money at risk, I'd even see some of these escalating into outright war.
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/telefonbetrug-wie-die...
How did we become "okay" with having most of the communication that reaches people be malicious? What is Federal law enforcement doing? Why the hell hasn't the FCC nuked these companies' ability to operate? Who is lobbying for this shit?