FCC: Phone Carriers That Profit From Robocalls Could Have All Calls Blocked (arstechnica.com) 55
"Bad-actor" phone companies that profit from robocalls could be blocked by more legitimate carriers under rules approved unanimously yesterday by the Federal Communications Commission. From a report: Under the change, the FCC said carriers can block calls "from bad-actor upstream voice service providers that pass illegal or unwanted calls along to other providers, when those upstream providers have been notified but fail to take action to stop these calls." Carriers that impose this type of blocking will get a safe harbor from liability "for the unintended or inadvertent blocking of wanted calls, thus eliminating a concern that kept some companies from implementing robust robocall blocking efforts."
This expanded level of blocking -- spurred by a new law in which Congress directed the FCC to expand safe harbors -- could be implemented by companies that sell phone service directly to consumers. That includes mobile carriers Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, traditional landline companies, and VoIP providers. Carriers won't be able to block calls from just any provider. As Chairman Ajit Pai explained, the safe harbor will be available in cases when the "bad-actor" telecom has been notified by the FCC that it is carrying illegal traffic and "fails either to effectively mitigate such traffic or to implement effective measures to prevent customers from using its network to originate illegal calls."
This expanded level of blocking -- spurred by a new law in which Congress directed the FCC to expand safe harbors -- could be implemented by companies that sell phone service directly to consumers. That includes mobile carriers Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, traditional landline companies, and VoIP providers. Carriers won't be able to block calls from just any provider. As Chairman Ajit Pai explained, the safe harbor will be available in cases when the "bad-actor" telecom has been notified by the FCC that it is carrying illegal traffic and "fails either to effectively mitigate such traffic or to implement effective measures to prevent customers from using its network to originate illegal calls."
You shouldn't let the phone company block calls (Score:1)
You should demand real caller ID
All the blocking should be decided by the user at his/her handset.
Re: You shouldn't let the phone company block call (Score:2)
May I suggest one exception: For private users, by default, it should be illegal to call them, unless you have a contract with them. Though private users can still switch, by saying they want a public number. Which will then be listed, like those of businesses.
And for businsses, it would be the other way around. They should also be able to ask for a private number.
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For private users, by default, it should be illegal to call them, unless you have a contract with them
This is a great idea. +1.
Really, it wouldn't be the worst if this were generally the rule for communications that show up to any sort of personally-identifiable address/protocol. If it's tied to the person, make it private by default.
Re: You shouldn't let the phone company block cal (Score:2)
Oh, and "contract" means what customers expect ot to mean. Not some third party acting under the name and by order of the one they have a contract with. Not any other funny shit. No technicalities! Trying to weasel around it, should result in double the punishment!
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Just require that the person be a first party signatory to the contract, and it has to come with well-defined terms of consideration or exchange of goods, a start and a stop date and time, and a clear description of the ways it can exited from in different circumstances and what the conditions and penalties, if applicable, would be. No transferrable or transitive games allowed.
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What is needed here is the right to retaliate where a "contract" is a blatant misrepresentation, with the maximum penalty for state actors being a declaration of war.
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For private users, by default, it should be illegal to call them
Sorry wrong number... You're under arrest!
No, what we need is the ability to blacklist and whitelist whole blocks of numbers, and make caller ID spoofing as impractical as possible. The law needs to be written to give the user the most control, not the phone company.
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We could simply exclude calls that aren't being paid for.
Are you really going to spam call people and deliberately avoid compensation? You'd starve.
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We already have a list of numbers it's not legal to call unless you have an existing business relationship with the recipient. It didn't help much.
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Then invoke a chain of responsibility. If you can't arrest the guy who made the call, go after his phone provider, and go down the chain until someone gets cuffed.
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Until that happens, block away!
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Won't STIR/SHAKEN allow that?
Just going to take a while.
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Wouldn't that cause us to throw away most phones to upgrade caller ID?
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Caller ID spoofing happens within the system, not your handset.
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This. No more :"Unknown Caller", "Invalid Number", or calls from India showing up as "John Smith" from my area code. The telecomms know damned well it's what people want and that it would solve the problem if we had phones that read that and decided if they should ring or not, they just don't want to do it.
I don't want to hear how "impossible" it is, if they know who to bill, they know who's calling.
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if they know who to bill
I think that part gets spoofed sometimes also. Still, it's their own fault, defective by design. It's impossible to stop spoofing entirely, but we can make it difficult and expensive for those who get caught. But, it will step on the wrong toes, so, never mind...
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You don't even comprehend what I posted
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No one is asking for it to be given free. We are asking it to be given in return for the right to operate as a phone carrier.
Quid pro quo.
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"Real" CID? ITYM ANI.All providers should be required to keep records linking the two, so the roboallers can be traced back.Any service provider which allows their customers to insert their own CID should be held responsible.I'd give a very generous leeway of 1000 leaked calls, but after that, they should be on the hook (pun intended) for any fake calls.
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Any service provider which allows their customers to insert their own CID should be held responsible
That simply should not be allowed.
I'd give a very generous leeway of 1000 leaked calls
Why? The other responder said ANI is impossible to fake. There's no reason to give them anything. With sufficient demand we can make it happen. People have to speak up
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Why not? There are perfectly legitimate reasons for it. Example: you call a customer service number. The agent can't immediately resolve the issue, but will have a supervisor/specialist call you back. That supervisor/specialist is in a completely different location, but the company wants the customer service number to be shown when you're called back. Perfectly reasonable, perfectly legitimate.
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Then route the call through customer service so the right number shows. Can't allow fake shit.
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Fine, false shit. If you don't see the number that is calling you, it's all bullshit
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Sounds half assed, full of loopholes. Anything from Pai is suspect. We have standards already. I am being told there is "metadata" within the signal that can't be spoofed that the phone companies don't pass through. This is the information we must demand, make the system as transparent as possible.
Why not force bad actor phone carriers ... (Score:2)
... to assign fixed called IDs to fixed customers, including internal ones, and then just ask them for the contract and address of the person with that ID/number. Then go after that person.
Why this convoluted way and corporations policong other corporations.
Who's the sovereign? The state or the corporations?
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The corporations are the sovereigns and the "governments" are the enforcement arm.
Governments, of the usual classical sense, as we were taught in school, aren't generally how the real world works (unless we're considering oligopolies, dictatorships, corporatocracies). The facile descriptions of democracy, republics, socialism, communism, and so on that we were fed aren't realistic descriptions of the situation on the ground.
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In case you didn't notice, this is an article about the government blocking corporations.
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Because the bad actors are, quite often, not subject to US law. The FCC can't force a phone company in India or Nigeria to do squat.
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I believe you're proposing precisely what the article is talking about, but I'm not sure because you're apparently too drunk or high to be able to construct grammatically completely sentences, or spell words correctly.
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To make this sensical
"Well they can indirectly, if a telco in India originates spam calls, block all calls originiating from that telco at the first switching center under the FCCs jurisdiction and send a notice to said telco that until they deal with the problem customer(s) all their revenue for calls terminating in the US will now be 0 as no calls will be terminated (that is no minutes will be billable). I suspect the spammers will be dealt with rather swiftly"
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It's not convoluted at all. If your company does nothing to ID its users and you have no protocol in place to ban bad customer then your whole service gets dropped.
Same thing happens with the internet. If you have no way for spam accounts to be reported or abusive domains registered to be reported... then the whole registrar just gets blacklisted as likely spam.
If you create a service that regularly sends false caller ID tags and has no Captchas let alone credit card or address or proof of identity to sig
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Because there is a lot of good intent in anonymity. You may have forgotten but when caller ID came out, there was a lot of controversy over it. You would think knowing who was calling would be a good thi
Spaghetti Code Western (Score:1)
How did our phone system end up so loosy-goosy such that it's hard to trace & punish the real caller?
I'd rather pay a bit more for real regulation than have the phone system be a nearly useless wild west sprawl of spam and riff-raff.
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How did our phone system end up so loosy-goosy such that it's hard to trace & punish the real caller?
I would say everyone should switch to FaceTime... but I get FaceTime (audio) spam calls also.
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Re: Spaghetti Code Western (Score:2)
Same as email and USENET. No one thought about it until some cunts abused the openness of it.
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And how did our banking system end up so loosey-goosey such that it's hard to trace & punish scammers and recover the money?
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How did our phone system end up so loosy-goosy such that it's hard to trace & punish the real caller?
In no small part because a very large and very vocal group of Americans will resist any form of government regulation of anything, particularly at a federal level.
I'd rather pay a bit more for real regulation than have the phone system be a nearly useless wild west sprawl of spam and riff-raff.
The sad part is that this never really needed legislation in the first place; there's nothing to stop a carrier putting a clause in a contract to the effect that they will refuse service if the other party sends spam calls and won't do anything about it. This could be a positive selling point if not for two problems:
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In large part, because consumers demanded number portability. So, the system had to be changed so that numbers can be anywhere geographically.
"pass illegal or unwanted calls" Huge Loophole (Score:1)
About time (Score:2)
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I have a few “retail” VOIP accounts which all run back to wholesalers. The problem is how far up/down the chain you take action. Very easy for the major providers to lock out their competition if implemented poorly.
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Thanks for your perspective, by the way. That wasn't something I'd considered.
treat it as terrorism (Score:1)