[greycol]

While I think a proposed "inbound fees" soloution is a ridiculous one other countries do not have spam calls figured out.

The reason it happens so much more in the U.S. more than other countries is the ease of exfiltrating money from an enviroment where on average you can get a wealthy target (relatively, even if someone is living paycheck to paycheck if they're paying $4000 in rent it's a pretty big paycheck worth targeting). If the US starts to get on top of spam calling there's a very real chance that the countries it doesn't happen often in will 'enjoy' a similar level of spam as established scammers retarget their efforts.

The good news is the US telcos are forced to do a lot of the heavy lifting in forcing foreign telcos they connect with to begin using SHAKEN/STIR protocols. This means that other countries (which are in just as bad a technical position as the US) will be able to pass similar regulation on their telcos, without having to worry about accidentally forcing them to cut off entire other countries, as most legitimate telcos will have cut their teeth while dealing with the US telcos.

N.B. SHAKEN/STIR protocol requirements basically means that you can identify a call and say to a foreign connecting telco "Here are these identifiable calls that are a problem, I'm sure it's not you so go talk to the smaller telco you provide services for that you can identify with these number (even if we can't) because we don't want to be forced to cut you off". It basically removes the deniability of "Well we've got 10 smaller sub telcos servicing the country/countries and no system implemented to tell which of the 10 is selling to bad actors" because it enforces having a system going out and if your not getting your sub telcos to use shaken/stir on the way in you're the problem.