> It isn't clear why it took the FCC roughly 20 months to move from the initial warnings to cutting the companies off
I'd like to know too. I am sure that spammers will try every delay tactic in the book, and while I am glad to hear that a deadline is approaching I am not pleased to learn that they were able to buy 20 months of time over the last deadline with a low-effort windows print test page. At this rate, actual lawyer tactics will buy them 20 years of delays for them and spam for us.
From working at a CLEC (competing local exchange carrier) in the 90's:
This mindset goes back to the AT&T antitrust breakup. It was decided that phone companies would not be allowed to reject each other's traffic, because the larger ILEC's (incumbent local exchange carrier) would find reasons and excuses to cut off the CLEC's. This would be more or less a death penalty to those businesses, and the ILEC's had exactly zero reason to want the CLEC's to exist at all, so there was a lot of fear and rulemaking to prevent this.
Fast forward 30 years and the details have changed, but the mindset is largely the same. The fear is still quite real, and that's why phone spam isn't treated like email spam. If i.e. verizon cuts off incoming calls from a random CLEC in a midwestern state, that business is just over, done, that's that. It would be impossible to restore the business after your customers left, which they would do more or less instantly; there's no court remedy that would fix it. Great pains are taken to ensure that such an action is legitimate.
The rules are oriented around the idea that the ILEC's were evil antitrust actors, and the plucky CLEC's are the competition we need to protect from big ILEC's heavy hand. In a world of spam, that mindset is backward. And that mindset is changing, but because of the reasonable concerns, it's taking longer than we expect.
"Finally, he noted that the FCC might have been hesitant to take an action that could harm customers. "One reason to be hesitant is that it's not just the bad actor network that gets cut off," Feld said. "Any innocent customers get cut off. This really goes against the entire mindset of the FCC. Generally, the FCC is about making sure that networks stay operational and that calls go through."
It's not "The FCC disconnected my provider"; it's "The FCC removed my provider from their list of trusted providers". Presumably, when your provider's customers start switching to their competitors, someone on the compliance desk will wake up.
Plenty of those seem to be non-US providers; perhaps their attitude is "Oh, some foreign regulator. Not my problem". But the regulator isn't actually regulating these providers; it's just listing the ones that (claim to) have a mitigation plan, however feeble.
I don’t think they have a compliance desk (i.e. there is no one whose sole job is compliance and probably no one who dedicates any reasonable amount of time to compliance). These companies are probably a lot smaller than you think - that probably goes for those who aren’t listed in the news article too. The president, secretary, treasurer and director of Computer Integrated Solutions, for example, are all the same person. They probably don’t have the wherewithal to do the work necessary to comply.
> Yeah, I know; I used the term "compliance desk" ironically. Sorry.
Ah I see. I was just trying to cover my bases to avoid splitting hairs over what compliance desk means and get to the point about these companies probably not being sophisticated enough to comply (or appear to comply).
> I just meant that someone is going to wake up, and realize that it's their problem, personally.
> Or not.
The or not is kind of what concerns me, because this might be the end for a lot of these companies. Rather than just cutting people off, the FCC should take a role kind of like how the Fed does, but for telecom. Take over the carrier, continue operations, assist the legit subscribers with moving onto a compliant carrier and then shut it down. I'm not sure how number portability is affected when a carrier just shuts down, but it might not be pretty.
A lot of people take the "shouldn't have signed up with spammy telco!" stance here as if everyone has the gift of knowing how to vet a carrier. Hopefully not too many people (and ideally no people) get hurt by this sort of enforcement.
> Take over the carrier, continue operations, assist the legit subscribers with moving onto a compliant carrier and then shut it down.
I got the impression that a lot of these firms are overseas. E.g., SIA Tet seems to be Latvian. The FCC can't just direct these companies; but they can "advise" (lean on) domestic carriers not to deliver their traffic.
In that case, there's not much that can be done, and also I think there's a stronger assumption of those numbers being disposable (at least for calling US family members and whatnot, plus just not being used as much to make legit international calls). But as far as US companies, I think the FCC stepping in would be appropriate if the FCC authorizes blocking their traffic.
The present telco network is very much operational. We don’t need an extremist response to spam from the FCC that causes making a phone call to acquire ‘aml attributes.
It’s to the point people don’t answer their phones due to the massive amount of spam calls. The network is losing relevance due to the lack of regulation.
My wife has used manufacturer-provided settings to configure her iPhone to not even ring or give her a "missed call" notification when she gets a call from a number not in her contacts. It's not losing relevance, it's lost relevance so long ago that 5-year-old phones were designed with features that would win business from consumers who recognized that it was poorly regulated.
An element of our younger siblings' (Gen Z) entire culture is a fear of/avoidance towards making and taking phone calls. Communication ecosystems have been built and crossed to the other side of the chicken-and-egg/network-effect hump l because POTS is so bad.
The only people left with landlines that lack caller ID and 'suspicious caller' filtering are the elderly, where they're continuously preyed upon by spammers.
Not only that, but even when the landline has Caller ID, there's no guarantee that the numbers you see have any relation to who is actually calling you. Even worse, landlines charge you extra for the privilege of inaccurate Caller ID. When I finally ditched my landline and moved it over to VoIP, AT&T's monthly fee for CID was greater than the entire monthly cost of my VoIP provider.
A shame, since if there was one thing the landline phone network was, it was reliable - in a way that cable can't even hope to match. Too bad that it got to be reliable for scammers as well.
> when she gets a call from a number not in her contacts. It's not losing relevance, it's lost relevance so long ago
This isn't the network losing relevance, she's literally still using it. She's just gatekeeping with her contacts.
I'm not saying we don't need to clamp down. But the downside of clamping down too hard is the calls from contacts in her address book not getting connected. That, and HN being littered with stories about people who are--for some random reason--unconnectable due to no fault of their own. That's the natural response if you let the "throw everyone in jail for the most minor infraction" crowd into the building.
Oh, so very much this. I pretty much won't answer phone calls from unfamiliar numbers, just because of the spam. I can't help but wonder how many important phone calls have been missed because of the spam tide.
There is no response too extreme in defense of the utility and relevance of the telephone system. The telephone system is one of modern humanity's crowning jewels, attacks against it are attacks against civilization itself. The government should be striking non-compliant telco executives with AGM-114R9X missiles (they've had several years of warning already) and then start working down the chain of command until the guilty telcos either surrender and comply or no longer exist. I am a moderate.
Given that it's not feasible for me to answer calls unless they come from someone I already know, a large aspect of the network is not operational in practice.
"We can't cut them off because they have customers who are not bad actors" is a favorite way for bad-actor networks to stay in business. Whether it's things like Cernel some years back, or the bogus telcos that are set up for serving spam, making sure that there are a few at least seemingly legitimate customers to use as hostages is a great way to bully the rest of the world into carrying your spam.
The issue is that legit, licensed businesses -- calling each other to conduct lawful business (not spam, calling to discuss pricing on existing deals) and T-Mobile blocking the calls. So, for example, a Verizon client is calling a State enforcement officer who's device is T-Mobile -- now the licensee call cannot go through to communicate with their enforcement officer -- which can lead to bad things -- such as LEO at your door with dogs and guns.
Not just T-Mobile; Twilio is also (selectively) hostile to cannabis. T-Mobile blocks (or tags as spam) 100s of legitimate, licensed businesses. From the FCC: "Universal service is the principle that all Americans should have access to communications services" -- and Twilio, T-Mobile (and other providers) make selective choices which are against that policy.
Playing Dumb is the easiest and oldest strategy in the book. Most kids figure it out before they learn to speak.
I am sure that a few of them are genuinely clueless, but at some point we have to cut them off to get their attention and I don't see how 20 months will help over 2, not when the ask is "make a plan."
I'd like to know too. I am sure that spammers will try every delay tactic in the book, and while I am glad to hear that a deadline is approaching I am not pleased to learn that they were able to buy 20 months of time over the last deadline with a low-effort windows print test page. At this rate, actual lawyer tactics will buy them 20 years of delays for them and spam for us.