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Phone companies and state attorneys general join forces to fight robocalls
US consumers receive as many as 350,000 unwanted calls every three minutes, according to the FCC. Despite multiple efforts to end the onslaught, an estimated 4.7 billion robocalls hit American phones in July alone. Now, attorneys general from all 50 states and the District of Columbia are teaming up with 12 carriers in a united effort to prevent and block the spam calls.
Under the new agreement, the carriers will implement call-blocking technology, make anti-robocall tools free to consumers and deploy a system that labels calls as legitimate or spam, The Washington Post reports. The companies also agree to aid investigations by law enforcement. The major players -- AT&T, Comcast, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon (Engadget's parent company) -- are on board, as well as smaller carriers -- Bandwidth, CenturyLink, Charter, Consolidated, Frontier, US Cellular and Windstream. Though, there's no deadline for the companies to implement these measures.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:59PM
Nothing new here, all your calls have already been available to the police, and available for tapping, since sometime not long after the invention of the phone company. This line is one of those that the politicians insert, and the carriers don't bother to negotiate away because it does nothing but describe the current status quo. But it makes the ignorant public feel like this new agreement has "done something".
In fact, all the data is already present for tracing every single call, including robocalls, back to their source in the billing system that charges the various carrier transport/interconnect fees. The carriers just have been dragging their feet because the robocalls contribute some percentage of their gross revenue, and they have no incentive (yet) to cut off their own revenue stream just to stop robocalls.