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FCC Chairman Warns of 'Regulatory Intervention' as He Criticizes Carriers' Anti-Robocall Plans (thehill.com)
The Federal Communications Commission will consider "regulatory intervention" if the major telecommunications carriers don't set up a system this year to stop spoofed robocalls, FCC chairman Ajit Pai said Wednesday. "It's time for carriers to implement robust caller ID authentication," Pai said in a statement, noting that some companies have already committed to carrying out protocols, known as the SHAKEN/STIR framework, in 2019. A report adds: Pai sent letters to major wireless carriers in November demanding that they adopt industry-wide frameworks to crackdown on the practice of "spoofing," where robocallers mask a call's origin with a fraudulent number on their caller ID. On Wednesday, the FCC chair followed up with another demand that they implement caller authentication systems this year and a threat over the repercussions if they don't comply. You can read responses from carriers FCC's website.
It annoys the wealthy, so of course he's moving to eliminate it. There's no dissonance.
Personally, I'm opposed to the idea that anybody's purely evil. I think people are driven by motivations we just don't understand or don't agree with.
From that perspective, I'll wildly speculate with no evidence or context! That's what Slashdotters do best!
By threatening regulation instead of actually proposing regulation, Pai has actually opened the door for carriers to avoid compliance. They can present timelines pulled from dark and smelly orifices, promising that they'll be compliant sometime in 2083, and Pai can then turn around and issue statements that the FCC is now working "for the people" and "working with carriers to ensure timelines are met". Any further push by the public to accelerate the standards' implementation will just be called political posturing, led by the Deep State to undermine the FCC's authority.
Meanwhile, the big carriers will demand subsidies to implement this new standard, and in the name of system-wide compatibility, they will insist the government adopt (and mandate) another new standard, conveniently authored by several industry insiders, and which relies on a software patent with exorbitant licensing fees, just-so-unfortunately out of reach for a startup carrier's budget.
To be clear, this post is intended to be modded "Funny". Please do not let it be "Insightful". For the sake of all Americans, I hope to be completely wrong.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Number isn't in my contact list, I just don't answer it. If it IS someone trying to reach me, they will leave a voice mail, and they get added to my contact list. If they don't, they go into my spam blocker. Problem solved.
Spoofing isn't the problem. Unauthenticated spoofing is the problem. The CID needs to be taken out of the hands of the businesses, and put in to the hands of the telecoms. They can then work with the companies to present the appropriate CID. It would be no problem for a company to register their main number, and say "calls from all these other numbers should appear to come from this one, here's proof we own this one" It's that proof part that we're skipping.
It always surprises me how quickly idealistic engineers design systems that fail to include ANY security/authentication system, and expect that humans will play nice. We know that simply doesn't work, it's been proven repeatedly for pretty much as long as humans have existed. It's not hard to authenticate ownership of the main number, phone it! There's no reason why the end user needs to be able to spoof any number they please without proving first that they own that number.