The government that governs least, governs best has long been a bastion of the USA. For centuries our laws and regulations have been based on letting industries self-govern and self-regulate. It's only when they don't that the government steps in.
That's what is happening with robocalling.
Despite input from industry giants including the mobile operators, telcos, service providers like Bandwidth.com and visionary companies like YouMail, the fact that robobcalling has reached the point it has, and that more calls today go unanswered than ever before is at pandemic proportions.
Robocalling, or automated dialing, was originally created as a time saver for call centers and telemarketers to reach people who were already doing business with them. Cold callers then started to use the same technology and soon came the scammers.
So what are the biggest issues with robocalling:
- Spoofing of numbers
- Repeated calls from different numbers to the same people
- Masking of numbers
- Fraudsters
In the old days the annoyance call bureau of a telco would work with customers to stop things dead in their tracks, but in the VoIP era many of these robocallers are not even in the USA, and the telcos efforts have become ineffective. The robocallers change telco providers by the hour, and often use credit cards that within a few days stop working. They are hardly caught, and even harder to find. In essence they can stay in business as long as the industry doesn't solve the problem itself.
Well the chairman of the FCC has had enough. As the HIll reports, "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."
This is where government stops saying to the industry, fix your problem and starts saying, "or else."