[darksaints]

I have a really tough time comprehending why it is such a difficult problem to solve. The FCC could have solved it by now, independently of congressional legislation, considering the fact that they regulate the issuance of phone numbers. Those overseas companies still have to get their US phone numbers from an FCC regulated body.

What am I missing?

[ajmurmann]

My guess is that it's a motivation problem. With email there was a huge motivation for email providers to fix spam. Email providers don't make money based on the quantity of emails sent and it's a well functioning market. The cost of moving your inbox to another provider is pretty low and there are many competitors. Contrast to this problem: telcos make more money if more calls get placed; there aren't many alternatives; barrier of entry to the market is very high; switching provider is painful; you cannot just try a different telco like you could for email.

[walrus01]

The massive global installed base of ss7 phone system/pstn equipment nobody wants to pay to replace or upgrade. Most solutions to securing ss7 or authentication of call origin require new custom software extensions built on top of something that is mid 1980s technology.

SS7 is from an era when big phone companies all trusted each other and interconnected without any of the modern crypto or authentication built into a modern network.

[Spooky23]

Why would the Verizon/AT&T lawyers running the FCC want do things that cost the telcos money?

It's not like these are long-term government employees, they are taking big paycuts in anticipation of getting private sector gigs later.

[toast0]

Two things:

1) Most of the spam calls are spoofing numbers, so it doesn't really matter who issued the numbers.

2) Spam calls could come from overseas numbers instead, I've certainly gotten a few. I'd rather they come from US numbers, so at least when people call back, they're not paying an arm and a leg for the call if they don't realize the number is non-US.

[zenexer]

#1 is a key point here, and understanding it is essential to solving this problem once and for all. It's not just caller ID that they're spoofing. PSTN works a bit like the internet: there are "good faith" peering agreements between telephone companies, and they rely on each other to report truthfully where a call is coming from.

However, there are many companies, especially overseas, that either deliberately shirk these duties or simply lack the funds, technology, and infrastructure to authenticate the sources of telephone calls. The result is something akin to IP address spoofing.

Without imposing major infrastructure overhauls on foreign nations, there's little the US government can do to eliminate these problems.

[GordonS]

Here in the UK, nowadays almost all robocalls and scam calls are coming from outside the UK. Mostly India as far as I can tell (they've sworn at me in Hindi).

[degenerate]

What you are missing is, the people abusing the phone number are typically not the owners. For example you can get a phone number from Twilio for $1/mo, and spam people from it. Just like you can upload a copyrighted song to YouTube, or download an MP3 from your ISP-provided internet. Owning the "platform" puts some responsibility on you, but it's not expected that you can stop ALL bad activity in its tracks.

What can be done though, is monitoring for massive calling patterns at the PSTN level, but big telcos are not interested/incentivized in stopping Robocalls because it generates a lot of $$ when the calls travel over the legacy phone network.

[Spooky23]

You punish the accountable parties appropriately.

When Twilio gets a $100k fine for abuse of the $1/mo number, they'll govern the behavior of their customer better and probably eliminate 80% of the bad actors in hours. You could also modify the regulation of interstate carriers to make it expensive to spam entire exchanges with junk calls, or even require licensing to utilize the PSTN. (Which allows you to punish licensees for bad behavior.)

These are all solvable problems, big companies respond quickly to sticks and over time to carrots.