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Ajit Pai proposes new rule that would allow carriers to block robocalls
On Wednesday, the Federal Communications Commission announced a new measure that would grant mobile phone carriers new abilities to block the growing number of unwanted robocalls.
The new rule would make it easier for carriers, like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, to automatically register their customers for call-blocking technology. As of right now, customers have to opt-in on their own. It would also allow customers to block calls coming from phone numbers that are not on their contacts list. Commissioners are expected to vote on the measure at their June 6th meeting.
"Allowing call blocking by default could be a big benefit for consumers who are sick and tired of robocalls," FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said. "By making it clear that such call blocking is allowed, the FCC will give voice service providers the legal certainty they need to block unwanted calls from the outset so that consumers never have to get them."
[...] A majority of the US Senate already backs legislation from Sens. John Thune (R-SD) and Ed Markey (D-MA) that would make it easier for the FCC to seek financial penalties from robocallers and provide both regulators and law enforcement additional tools to combat these unwanted and illegal calls.
Members in the House of Representatives like Energy and Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ) also have their own anti-robocalling legislation that differs from what's been proposed in the Senate, but it includes some similar language, like increasing the length of time the FCC has to find and go after bad actors.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday May 20 2019, @07:55PM
They don't know who is actually calling, which is the problem. The ANI system is broken. Out-of-band signalling used to provide information like that, and blocking your own Caller-ID in the beginning was just a flag to suppress information already being sent. That system is pretty much defunct. I have many times already tried pushing an incident up to level-1 carrier with no results. It requires subpoenas the entire way, and each entity says the same fucking thing, "We dunno".
It's funny that somebody said make the caller pay and robocalls will become economically non-viable, because it's already that way. Did they think it was free with the robocallers having unlimited minutes in a flat-rate connection? The issue is that is cheap for them when you can purchase blocks of 250k calls at a time.
There are TWO call legs involved.
- The caller, and their VoIP provider does have the billing information. This information DOES NOT travel along with the signalling information. Caller-ID info is SPOOFED, so the information in the call signalling is fucking worthless. The VoIP provider DOES NOT correct the spoofed information, even though they damn well know the correct number to apply and add to the signalling.
- The callee, and their VoIP provider has billing information too, because in the cases of VoIP the callee is charged. The VoIP provider can only pass along information present in the signalling, and can do nothing more. Furthermore, they already got paid and don't need to go after caller funds, completely obviating the need to settle billing regularly with other telcos.
So you see, BOTH sides are paying, which is the problem. No incentive to push billing info like that anymore, and I've never heard of any VoIP outfit supporting reverse charges. AFAIK, no such methods exist in the signalling at all. Call legs pay their own respective fees and cannot share them. In most cases it's now pre-paid billing and not post-paid.
You would think the government would have their panties in a bunch right WRT surveillance and taps? Nope. That's because they've got mediation switches everywhere and the FBI uses their point-and-click platform to perform call intercepts at will. In other words, unless you have access to those back rooms that the NSA/FBI controls, you can't fight the robocallers. The NSA/FBI are sure as fuck not going to do anything with the illegal surveillance platforms. It's legal only in the sense that they have an honor policy in which they say they don't look at what they've collected without a warrant, and then limit what they view. Complete bullshit of course.
Meanwhile, for the average citizen how do we deal with robocalls? The answer is real fucking simple: Anti-spoofing laws like what Mississippi has on the books. I don't need to get a court order anymore to figure out who is making a harassing phone call. All I have to do is report the spoofing since it is now a crime. That will flow back to the caller's VoIP provider, which will then in turn, cut off the caller's account simply due to legal liability. That, and the VoIP provider could stop them from spoofing in their tracks with an approved whitelist of Caller ID information that can be set by caller equipment.
Once you have that in place, it becomes a whack-a-mole game for a little while during the building of real-time black hole lists for phone numbers. Eventually though, bad outfits will have a very hard time obtaining clean phone numbers that are not already blocked. This period could be heavily shortened if an average callee can report and post a phone number to the black lists. Callers could object, but that would involve coming out of the shadows, something bad outfits cannot do.
That in a nutshell, is why you cannot stop robocallers today. If I can't stop it from the relative insides of the telco's, what chance do you have?
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.