FCC chair wants carriers to block robocalls from spoofed numbers [telecom]

FCC chair wants carriers to block robocalls from spoofed numbers

The FCC in 2015 made it clear that voice service providers can offer call blocking tools to customers, but commissioners said at the time that more needed to be done about Caller ID spoofing. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has now scheduled a preliminary vote for March 23 on new rules designed to solve the problem.

"One particularly pernicious category of robocalls is spoofed robocalls, i.e., robocalls where the caller ID is faked, hiding the caller's true identity," the proposal says. "Fraudsters bombard consumers' phones at all hours of the day with spoofed robocalls, which in some cases lure consumers into scams (e.g., when a caller claims to be collecting money owed to the Internal Revenue Service) or lead to identity theft."

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***** Moderator's Note *****

I wonder if the FCC chairman is planning to run for public office: he's certainly grabbing for free publicity. Given the LECs *permission* to spend a lot of money and time providing a service that will anger direct-marketing companies and benefit only powerless consumers isn't likely to produce any change.

If it benefits the public and lessens fraud, why isn't Mr. Pai seeking to make it a *requirement*?

Bill Horne Moderator

Reply to
Monty Solomon
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We already have plenty of rules that have no technical means of enforcement to deal with robocalling. What makes anyone think that adding more is going to help anything?

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

And this, in short, is why having technical commissioners instead of a panel of lawyers is essential.

Because you can make all the laws you want, but you can't necessarily make machines follow them.

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

I disagree: having "technical" commissioners can lead to a situation where a difuse oligopoly orders manufacturers to provide only the most profitable features in their switching equipment, and leave out things that might provide better service but wouldn't make as much money. In the past, "technical" commissioners have been misled by claims that the state-of-the-art didn't allow for improvements already in place in other countries, since the "state" of the art was being dictated by Ma Bell's accountants.

When the FCC decided to implement LNP, it was lawyers who drafted the regulations, and those rules amounted to an order to "Just Do It" within one year, with no excuses allowed. Guess what? Ma Bell just did it.

Bill

Reply to
Bill Horne

You might want to do some more reading before leaping to conclusions.

The specific rules to be voted on allow carriers to block calls from invalid numbers, either ones that aren't possible under NANP rules, or are syntactically valid but not allocated, without needing a prior request from the customer.

That seems pretty reasonable to me. It's certainly not going to solve the problem, but it nibbles around the edges. In the meantime, at last week's IETF meeting the slog toward signed SIP headers, which will make it possible to validate incoming call ID, continued.

R's, John

Reply to
John Levine

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