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The House and Senate finally agree on something: Robocalls – TechCrunch
In these times of political strife, it’s nice that despite our differences we can still band together as a nation in the face of a catastrophe that affects us all equally. I speak, of course, of robocalls, and it seems that the House and Senate have put their differences aside for the present in order to collaborate on a law combating this scourge.
[...] As often happens in Congress, two competing versions of the bill emerged to address this issue, and both passed in their respective chambers earlier this year. Now the leaders of the committees involved have announced an “agreement in principle” that will hopefully allow them to pass a unified version of the bill.
The “Pallone-Thune TRACED Act” owes its name to its primary sponsors — Rep. Pallone (D-NJ) and Sen. John Thune (R-SD) — and the earlier and superior acronym from the House act, Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence.
“Our agreement will require telephone carriers to verify calls and allow robocalls to be blocked in a consistent and transparent way, all at no extra charge to consumers. The agreement also gives the FCC and law enforcement the ability to quickly go after scammers,” said Rep. Pallone in a statement accompanying the news.
The bill text is expected to be finalized in a matter of days, and it will hopefully make it onto the legislative calendar in a hurry.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 17 2019, @11:27PM
They are charging the FCC (referred to as the "Commission" and whose members a quite well-known) to promulgate regulations within 1 year of enactment. They are also increasing the enforcement powers, including confiscation of dial-out numbers, lengthening the statute of limitations, increasing other penalties. They are requiring U.S. telecom companies to implement call authentication (probably with a mind on SHAKEN/STIR, but not limited to it) and allow people to reject unauthenticated calls. They are making it illegal for a telecom company to charge their customers directly for call-blocking technology. They are also requiring telecom companies submit any evidence of repeated robocalls to the FBI. They make one-ring scams illegal. They are making a working group of member of the federal government on what inter-agency policies and inter-governmental MoUs should be issued regarding criminal enforcement of robocall violations. They create a commission to see if there are any special requirements to specifically block robocalls to hospitals. And then, finally, they allocate no additional funds to anyone for this legislation.