What would you like to regulate that is better than letting people set inbound fees?

How about banning calling people with robots? Then enforcing it.

How about appointment reminders from my doctor? Should those be banned?

Obviously you would need an exception for calls you've given consent to receive.

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?

Theoretically you already need to have a relationship with the sender today. Set an inbound fee and some people will set a high fee which catches the unwary and many legit senders simply will refuse as a matter of policy.

The obvious implementation would warn the caller that there is a fee and tell them how much it is, and then notify the recipient if they had a caller who refused the charge and provide their number.

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.

Make it hard for people to reach you and they’ll be happy to just hang up. They have better things to do than get through to people playing elaborate games. It’s usually hard enough to connect to a doctor’s office as it is without expecting them to jump through hoops to get you on the phone.

"Press 1 to pay $0.10 and connect the call" is an elaborate game?

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.

> "Press 1 to pay $0.10 and connect the call" is an elaborate game?

[...]

> 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.

I'm not sure what you're referring to as an unnecessary burden. Identifying who it is you consent to have call you? How do you propose to avoid that without allowing either everyone or no one to call you?

This sounds like a pretty huge hassle to me as a phone customer, honestly. I'd prefer that they just have to get my consent first. It would be a lot cleaner and easier for everyone, including the marketers.

Did you want the version where consent is easy to get and then you still get tons of spam calls, or the one where consent is hard to get and then many useful services don't exist?

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.

If you are that bothered by spam calls you probably need to make the tradeoff that you’re ok with not being able to reliably receive calls from numbers that aren’t on an explicit white list.

Various fixes are underway but today you have to make that personal trade off.

Why would you need to receive an automated voice call for a reminder?

> Why would you need to receive an automated voice call for a reminder?

Because they want to. The burden of evidence is on the side trying to restrict what others do.

Not everyone can read texts as easily as the majority of the population. Some people can’t read at all.

There are many downsides to banning robocalls outright.

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.

As someone who has never lived in a country where automated calls happen: what quality of life do you imagine I've been missing out on?

Just to note: we do get appointment reminders here.

> this kind of “just ban it” mindset creates a lot of invisible loss in our world.

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?

Instead, let me ask you this: why is this a uniquely American problem. Certainly I don't hear about it frequently happening in other countries.

While I think a proposed "inbound fees" soloution is a ridiculous one other countries do not have spam calls figured out.

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.

Phone calls to mobile phones are much more expensive in other countries.

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.

> Phone calls to mobile phones are much more expensive in other countries.

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.

> Where I live both are rated the same which is to say, essentially free

I believe Swiss domestic calls are an order of magnitude more expensive than American calls.

If you had looked past the tld in the domain and clicked through, you’d have gotten my country right.

This is the internet equivalent of “don’t judge a book by its cover (or a website by its tld)” :)

(I live in Belgium)

Belgian mobile calls are about a third cheaper than American ones, on average, all costs included. (Sending costs remain remarkably low in the U.S.)

It has been a problem in the UK -

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...

There are industry experts who know the technical answers to your question and lawyers who know the legal ones, why should I have to come up with it myself?

Funnily enough people have stopped using phone calls for anything other than spam, so the problem has solved itself.

Spam calls are already generally illegal, it's a matter of enforcement:

https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/robocalls

A lot of people may not like regulation, but that excludes the issue of robocallers and spam marketers. People on both political spectrums support regulation here. The problem is that existing regulation is ignored and not being enforced