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.