[smelendez]

This and the grandparent explanation are very helpful. Thank you both!

The frustrating thing is I would bet that the vast, vast majority of people in the US do not want anything except those “type A assertion” calls: calls from trusted users of trusted carriers. And I say this as someone who regularly communicates with friends and business associates overseas but essentially never through the traditional phone network.

It seems like that would also cover the situations some people often mention regarding emergencies, since a hospital, school, or random person on the street won’t be calling through some fly-by-night carrier.

I get some people and businesses have more complex needs, and I’m sure there are a million corner cases. But it feels like if you let people easily opt in to a sensible but restrictive plan, and allowlist trusted carriers in other countries, you’d solve a lot of this problem?

[kjellsbells]

> opt in to a sensible but restrictive plan, and allowlist trusted

The irony is that the end users have built this by themselves: ignore all calls unless they are from a known contact, at best, diverting the rest to voicemail. Basically each user builds a 1-deep network of trust. Sad that it had to come to this.

There's are argument that says this is all a side effect of a technological innovation: the rise of VoIP/SIP over TDM.

[dmurray]

It seems like a failure of the free market. If instead it were prohibitively expensive to run a telecommunications provider, and no country would have more than two or three, the spam calls could be regulated away. Perhaps at the expense of other technological or financial innovation.