[endymi0n]

I'm always wondering why Americans allow their lawmakers to get away with this.

In order to stop robocalls, you just need to do three things:

* Flat out ban them and make it illegal to route them at network handover points

* Make caller ID mandatory with a reachable number to call back to

* Create an authority caring for those robocall reports

Then, put heavy fines on violations and go enforce the heck out of it. That's exactly what the EU did pretty much in the infancy of this technology.

I can't recall ever getting a robocall here in Germany.

That being said, my bet is this being a tragedy of the commons, as the only two parties in the system seem to heavily rely on the tool for fundraising — oh and they probably also make millions for some selected members of congress... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[gwd]

> I can't recall ever getting a robocall here in Germany.

The simpler reason you haven't gotten a robocall on your cell phone^W^W"handy" is that the caller pays a non-negligible amount of money to call you (at some point it was around £0.25). This makes the sort of mass spam calling that's happening in the US uneconomical. In the US, the receiver pays the cost of the tower-to-mobile connection; meaning it's fractions of a cent to call anyone, even on their cell phone.

Making the US more like Europe in that regard would instantaneously get rid of a massive amount of spam calls, without the need for any more complicated regulation.

[bluGill]

It would also get rid of a massive amount of useful calls. Germany doesn't get robo calls, but that is at the expensive of not being able to use their phones as a phone when they want to.

Back when cell minutes were expensive what Germany has made sense. Today nearly everyone in the US has unlimited voice minutes (in and out) and nobody worries about how long they talk to each other.

[mschuster91]

> Back when cell minutes were expensive what Germany has made sense. Today nearly everyone in the US has unlimited voice minutes (in and out) and nobody worries about how long they talk to each other.

The thing is, the "flatrates" aren't flatrates under the hood. The providers still pay fees per minute to each other, they're just fractions of a cent now - but at a scale of hundreds of thousands of minutes a month, a robocall outfit can still generate five to six figures of revenue for the phone networks.

[evgen]

This is just flat-out wrong. I am sitting here in the UK and I get occasional calls from my bank, from businesses, and even from what appear to be random numbers (e.g. when my Ocado driver is running late/early and wants to update me about delivery using his own phone.) Because I do not get bullshit robocalls [0] I actually answer the phone. Yes, a lot of people have limited minutes of phone time, but since most "calls" are over IP-based comm channels I know of few people who hit the limit; it is effectively unlimited minutes here too.

Want to know the number I do not answer? My US VOIP number that I keep for business purposes. It all goes straight to voicemail and I wait for the transcription to tell me if it is another extended warrantee offer, someone wanting to tell me my computer is infected with herpes/ebola, a fake tax issue from a state I have never lived in, or if it is in the 1% of calls to that number I actually want to receive. US mobile customers have had unlimited calls for more than a decade, but I did not get a noticeable level of spam calls ten years ago.

It is not about the number of minutes available, it is simply a matter that Europeans care about the problem and prevent it from happening while US carriers do not care and their customers did not care enough to create sufficient political pressure.

[0] there actually has been a rise in one type of scam robocall over the past couple of years: the "we have been notified that you were recently in a car accident" calls are a once a month or so annoyance.

[bluGill]

If i understand you right, by IP based you mean you are switching from a system where anyone can call anyone on any system to one where both parties have to be on the same ecosystem (proprietary app). That is not a win for communication.

[acdha]

> Germany doesn't get robo calls, but that is at the expensive of not being able to use their phones as a phone when they want to.

Can you explain this? My German friends have never mentioned that as a problem and based on how surprised most Europeans seem to be that Americans let spammers train the country not to answer calls it seems like the opposite is true.

[bluGill]

It has been 10 years since I looked - 10 years ago spam wasn't a problem and Americans usd their phone for voice about 5 times as much as anyone else.

Even today most people I know answer their phone when it rings. And most people call each other often (though video calls are becoming common) We complain about the spam problems, but most people still answer the phone.

Anecdotally I can say spam calls were never the majority of my calls - and I don't talk on the phone much compared to most people I know. And the amount of spam calls has been going down a lot.

[ectopod]

A large proportion of the spam that makes it into my gmail inbox is from American politicians and I'm not even American. They are indeed part of the problem.

[vanusa]

I'm always wondering why Americans allow their lawmakers to get away with this.

Generations of brainwashing in support of the divine right of "free enterprise" has something to do with it, I suspect.