US Regulator Demands Companies Take Action To Halt Robocalls (reuters.com)

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on Monday wrote the chief executives of major telephone service providers and other companies, demanding they launch a system no later than 2019 to combat billions of "robocalls" and other nuisance calls received by American consumers. Reuters reports: In May, Pai called on companies to adopt an industry-developed "call authentication system" or standard for the cryptographic signing of telephone calls aimed at ending the use of illegitimate spoofed numbers from the telephone system. Monday's letters seek answers by Nov. 19 on the status of those efforts.

The letters went to 13 companies including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Alphabet, Comcast, Cox, Sprint, CenturyLink, Charter, Bandwith and others. Pai's letters raised concerns about some companies current efforts including Sprint, CenturyLink, Charter, Vonage, Telephone and Data Systems and its U.S. Celullar unit and Frontier. The letters to those firms said they do "not yet have concrete plans to implement a robust call authentication framework," citing FCC staff. The authentication framework "digitally validates the handoff of phone calls passing through the complex web of networks, allowing the phone company of the consumer receiving the call to verify that a call is from the person supposedly making it," the FCC said.

Comments

Just follow the money

[Koby77]

How is it that a phone network would know who to bill for a call, but would not know who placed the call?

Re:Just follow the money

[Koby77]

Then it seems to me that no endpoint authentication is required. Simply mandate that the originating network, which of course knows the caller ID of its own subscriber, to pass along the correct caller ID. Otherwise there shall be statutory fines. Such statutory fines are already commonplace in other industries for violators.

Re:Just follow the money

[Anonymous Coward]

It is 100% controllable by the phone companies.

I work with SIP and PBX professionally. I can pass anything I want out to my provider, but you can be assured that they know with absolute certainty what DIDs I SHOULD be passing out legitimately.

My provider could stop all spoofed numbers from me before they go out anywhere, and eliminate ~90% of all this scam/spam/spoofing overnight. Providers only need to police their own networks to reduce spoofing and all the crap that comes with it.

Any legitimate need to spoof a number (which are a vanishingly small number) should be documented and legally approved.

Consumers

[dromgodis]

...and other nuisance calls received by American consumers.

Maybe that's where the problem is. You are not US citizens or residents. You are US consumers.

Re:The spoofing has a legitimate purpose

[aardvarkjoe]

Yeah, you guys bring this up every single time.

And you don't seem to get that we don't care. The only way to prevent people from abusing the ability to hide their number is to absolutely prohibit it. The very dubious benefit of allowing a company to display their "main" number on the caller ID is so far outweighed by the problems of spoofed numbers that it is not worth considering.