[nostromo]

Telcos are one of the most regulated industries in existence.

And as I point out in my sibling comment, bad regulation is the reason this problem exists: because telcos are not legally able to block most spam calls. If not for this regulation, telcos would have solved spam callers long ago by blocking suspected sources of spam. (Instead, they do work-arounds like labeling them "scam likely.")

[supertrope]

The FCC gave the green light to blocking spam in June 2019. https://www.fcc.gov/news-events/blog/2019/06/05/beating-back.... This resolved AT&T's concern/excuse that their legal obligation to connect all calls included spam.

[Nifty3929]

I gave you an upvote even though I'm going to disagree with you. In general, I'm very open-market and low-regulation - however in this particular case you're touching on the idea of a "common carrier," which is an important idea.

When you have one (or a small number of) providers, in a high-barrier-to-entry industry, that provides a critical service - this gives these providers enormous power over us if they were to refuse to do business with us or charge us higher rates. Think water, electric, shipping/postal, internet access, telco, etc.

What if the postal service decided to stop doing business with you, perhaps because of the offensive content of the letters you want to send? Or nobody will ship your merchandise because they don't approve of it? Or your internet provider cancels you? And what if there are a small number of them that collude on these bans, so now you can't even switch providers?

By designating certain industries as "common carriers" it prohibits them from denying service to anyone for any reason, except for particularly obvious, egregious and illegal reasons.

If you want to send out Nazi propaganda newsletters to people who have requested them - the US Postal Service will (and should, I believe) deliver them for you.

We should not allow telcos to decide who's calls to put through. This is a job for legislators and law enforcement, however imperfect those solutions are.

[chinabot]

Scam calls are already criminal what more regulation is required?

[zackmorris]

That sounds plausible, I can understand that carriers shouldn't filter traffic, because that goes against net neutrality. So it sounds like carriers can't block traffic at their level, but can attach metadata that the end user can block. I did a quick search on how that would work and found this info from Robokiller (no affiliation):

https://www.robokiller.com/robocall-blocking-technology

Under the Governmental backing turndown arrow:

We’re fighting behind the scenes to get government support for better fighting robocalls. The FCC’s TRACED Act is just one piece of legislation we’re behind that will increase penalties for robocallers–but there’s far more work that needs to be done.

I realized a TL;DR of my rant after writing it:

Organized crime is stealing from members of the community and the police rarely succeed in returning stolen property. The mayor claims to be trying to help, but mostly works at reelection. Half the community wants to pass a law to fine a middleman who sees crime occurring but does little to stop it. The other half claims that the law itself facilitates the crime and wants to cancel more laws. Some people hire a watchdog to prevent the crime, and that seems to work. Others feel that if the crime affects the whole community, then a solution should be part of the commons, because vulnerable and/or impoverished members of the community would be left defenseless otherwise.

I'm in that second camp. I feel that a conservative argument here is: if I have to be bothered by every little thing because the government can't do its job to defend the community and the security of its property, then that's not a republic, it's anarchy.