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from the fifty-ways-to-beat-your-scammer dept.
US Attorneys General will take legal action against telecom providers enabling robocalls:
The Attorneys General of all 50 states have joined forces in hopes of giving teeth to the seemingly never-ending fight against robocalls. North Carolina AG Josh Stein, Indiana AG Todd Rokita and Ohio AG Dave Yost are leading the formation of the new Anti-Robocall Litigation Task Force. In Stein's announcement, he said the group will focus on taking legal action against telecoms, particularly gateway providers, allowing or turning a blind eye to foreign robocalls made to US numbers.
He explained that gateway providers routing foreign phone calls into the US telephone network have the responsibility under the law to ensure the traffic they're bringing in is legal. Stein said that they mostly aren't taking any action to keep robocalls out of the US phone network, though, and they're even intentionally allowing robocall traffic through in return for steady revenue in many cases.
Recently: FCC Orders Phone Carriers to Block Scammers Behind 8 Billion Robocalls.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday August 08 2022, @02:27PM
Thank you, you have a good big-picture realistic view and summarize well. I'm rational enough to see merits on both sides of the coin, including politics. Like you so eloquently wrote, the bigger it is, and the bigger the demand is, the less truly free the market is. Although I'm in favor of free-market and free-enterprise for many things, goods and services that are essential to most people's lives need to be highly regulated. Back in the day the monopoly Bell Telephone and AT&T were heavily regulated, and system and service quality was amazing. Local phone service was very inexpensive, but "long-distance" was astronomical. Others (MCI?) wanted to compete on long-distance, got govt. involved, giant boondoggle, broke up Bell / AT&T. Long distance got cheaper, but local service got more expensive, and quality slowly went down.
To some extent phone and Internet services are regulated, but maybe not enough, or not in the right ways. That companies like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T grow so huge so quickly should inspire more govt. scrutiny and action. But like you said, the whole govt. - corporation machine, aka "corporatocracy", might be too big, powerful, and entrenched at this point for anyone to make significant strides in getting things under control.
My ongoing wish: Internet, including cell carriers, would fall under utility category, and be regulated.
I became very aware of this corporatocracy problem 25 years ago. For all of the reasons you wrote, I'm cynical and have no belief that Congress will ever do much to fix these problems. Little scratches and dents here and there for show, but no real major overhaul.
Case in point: I'm having barely any cell service where I live. NO T-Mobile, despite their coverage maps saying I should have good signal. I'm not sure what to do about it. I called them, they're very nice and said they'd look into it, but weeks later and no change. FCC should be the ones to fix it, but even they say they don't get involved in individual's problems. Maybe, I'll try. And maybe FTC and/or other govt. agencies, but again, scratches and dents. Oh, and AT&T are throttling my Internet speed, and they're fearless and arrogant enough to tell on their website: if you buy a plan directly from AT&T, they promise they won't throttle your speeds. Obviously admitting they _do_ throttle some people's speeds (those of us on 3rd-party MVNO plans...)