Okay, and in the three years since then, have they made any progress? If not, why am I wrong if I think they may have just been using that as an excuse?
I do want to clarify that the phone companies making money from robocalls are not YOUR phone company. Phone companies that provide services to consumers lose money from robocalls, have to deal with unsatisfied customers, and really want both a technological and legal solution. The problem is a vast array of VoIP providers that let anyone with a valid credit card sign up and start pumping calls in real time. To them the revenue loss from people sometimes signing up with a stolen card and sending a bunch of scam calls is much smaller than that gained from having a low barrier for signup.
Unfortunately, at this point the solution is to play hardball and say "start either vetting your customers better or providing us with accurate uuids so we can block/report them for you, otherwise we will no longer route calls originating from your voip service".
Perhaps even connect the call to a automated message that says, "we're sorry, <voip telco> has had its services disconnected for fraud. Goodbye"
But US phone companies don't want to do that because of the potential revenue loss.
That's the path the FCC is going down, with starting to implement "Know Your Customer" rules similar to banks that require them to gather enough information to prevent easily setting up fake accounts.
Starting to implement? They promised a fix like 2 years ago. I have about as much faith in the FCC accomplishing anything significant as I do in buying an extended auto warranty from a random caller.
I mean we were starting from a system that was basically e-mail, except where providers were required to deliver all messages without any discrimination or filtering. They had to create a new framework that allowed for carriers to choose not to deliver calls, interoperable technology to authenticate calls, and now close loopholes that are still allowing bad actors access to the phone network. It's a fundamental rearchitecting of how the phone network works that requires every single operator to make upgrades, so yeah it's going to take some time. And you're not really going to see much progress until it's nearly finished because if 90% of the network is secure you'll just see the same volume of crap through the remaining 10%.
That date has already passed and it is still a serious issue. Not to mention the billions we handed out to telecom companies to assist with upgrades that they just pocketed.
You don't need to go all orwellian though. Just charge a security fee that makes spamming or scamming unprofitable for every call and add a simple way for the recipient to mark calls as wanted or unwanted.
> Unfortunately, at this point the solution is to play hardball and say "start either vetting your customers better or providing us with accurate uuids so we can block/report them for you, otherwise we will no longer route calls originating from your voip service".
Then this becomes a backdoor way for the bigger players to discriminate against new, smaller players that are otherwise legit and doing their best to keep spammers/scammers off of their network.
The absence of these problems in a big part of the world will tell you the problem is not, and never has been, technical. It's a political problem, or rather the problem with the leadership of US telcos.
