"Finally, he noted that the FCC might have been hesitant to take an action that could harm customers. "One reason to be hesitant is that it's not just the bad actor network that gets cut off," Feld said. "Any innocent customers get cut off. This really goes against the entire mindset of the FCC. Generally, the FCC is about making sure that networks stay operational and that calls go through."
Plenty of those seem to be non-US providers; perhaps their attitude is "Oh, some foreign regulator. Not my problem". But the regulator isn't actually regulating these providers; it's just listing the ones that (claim to) have a mitigation plan, however feeble.
I just meant that someone is going to wake up, and realize that it's their problem, personally.
Or not.
Ah I see. I was just trying to cover my bases to avoid splitting hairs over what compliance desk means and get to the point about these companies probably not being sophisticated enough to comply (or appear to comply).
> I just meant that someone is going to wake up, and realize that it's their problem, personally.
> Or not.
The or not is kind of what concerns me, because this might be the end for a lot of these companies. Rather than just cutting people off, the FCC should take a role kind of like how the Fed does, but for telecom. Take over the carrier, continue operations, assist the legit subscribers with moving onto a compliant carrier and then shut it down. I'm not sure how number portability is affected when a carrier just shuts down, but it might not be pretty.
A lot of people take the "shouldn't have signed up with spammy telco!" stance here as if everyone has the gift of knowing how to vet a carrier. Hopefully not too many people (and ideally no people) get hurt by this sort of enforcement.
I got the impression that a lot of these firms are overseas. E.g., SIA Tet seems to be Latvian. The FCC can't just direct these companies; but they can "advise" (lean on) domestic carriers not to deliver their traffic.
The present telco network is very much operational. We don’t need an extremist response to spam from the FCC that causes making a phone call to acquire ‘aml attributes.
An element of our younger siblings' (Gen Z) entire culture is a fear of/avoidance towards making and taking phone calls. Network-effect ecosystems have grown and developed because POTS is so bad.
The only people left with landlines that lack caller ID and 'suspicious caller' filtering are the elderly, where they're continuously preyed upon by spammers.
A shame, since if there was one thing the landline phone network was, it was reliable - in a way that cable can't even hope to match. Too bad that it got to be reliable for scammers as well.
This isn't the network losing relevance, she's literally still using it. She's just gatekeeping with her contacts.
I'm not saying we don't need to clamp down. But the downside of clamping down too hard is the calls from contacts in her address book not getting connected. That, and HN being littered with stories about people who are--for some random reason--unconnectable due to no fault of their own. That's the natural response if you let the "throw everyone in jail for the most minor infraction" crowd into the building.
I am sure that a few of them are genuinely clueless, but at some point we have to cut them off to get their attention and I don't see how 20 months will help over 2, not when the ask is "make a plan."
This mindset goes back to the AT&T antitrust breakup. It was decided that phone companies would not be allowed to reject each other's traffic, because the larger ILEC's (incumbent local exchange carrier) would find reasons and excuses to cut off the CLEC's. This would be more or less a death penalty to those businesses, and the ILEC's had exactly zero reason to want the CLEC's to exist at all, so there was a lot of fear and rulemaking to prevent this.
Fast forward 30 years and the details have changed, but the mindset is largely the same. The fear is still quite real, and that's why phone spam isn't treated like email spam. If i.e. verizon cuts off incoming calls from a random CLEC in a midwestern state, that business is just over, done, that's that. It would be impossible to restore the business after your customers left, which they would do more or less instantly; there's no court remedy that would fix it. Great pains are taken to ensure that such an action is legitimate.
The rules are oriented around the idea that the ILEC's were evil antitrust actors, and the plucky CLEC's are the competition we need to protect from big ILEC's heavy hand. In a world of spam, that mindset is backward. And that mindset is changing, but because of the reasonable concerns, it's taking longer than we expect.
I'd like to know too. I am sure that spammers will try every delay tactic in the book, and while I am glad to hear that a deadline is approaching I am not pleased to learn that they were able to buy 20 months of time over the last deadline with a low-effort windows print test page. At this rate, actual lawyer tactics will buy them 20 years of delays for them and spam for us.