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> At the Federal Communications Committee, the loudest voices come from the telecommunications operators. There’s an imbalance in the control that the consumer

> At the Federal Communications Committee, the loudest voices come from the telecommunications operators. There’s an imbalance in the control that the consumer ultimately has over who gets to invade their telephone versus these other interests. This, plus the monetary incentives are the root reason it's still a problem. Ignoring the actual scam part, the companies terminating the calls (that is: your phone provider) is making money on two ends: they get paid by the originator, and they get paid by the consumer they're delivering the call to (you). The telco originating the call is getting paid by the spammer. Spam is profitable for everybody. > I think that we’ll be able to push the genie a long way back into the bottle. The measure of success is that we all won’t be scared to answer our phone. It’ll be a surprise that it’s a robocall—instead of the expectation that it’s a robocall. I think a different genie is out of the bottle that won't go back in: the expectation you can immediately and synchronously interrupt any person and demand their full attention. I almost never answer my phone for that reason, not just because of spam. I'd just rather interact asynchronously via text or email, without interrupting whatever I happen to be doing. If I'm able I'll reply quickly, and I'm happy to switch to a synchronous phone call if it makes sense (I'd still prefer that over dozens of back-and-forth texts where nuance is tricky and it's easier to misunderstand each other). It's at the point if my spouse or most close family/friends actually phone me, my reaction is "Oh no, what's wrong?"

criddell 2y ago
> they get paid by the consumer they’re delivering the call to That doesn’t make any sense. I don’t have the phone so that I can receive spam calls. If they were able to eliminate all spam calls overnight, people wouldn’t cancel their service.
- nordsieck 2y ago
  > If they were able to eliminate all spam calls overnight, people wouldn’t cancel their service. Are there many people without any phone service?
- gregmac 2y ago
  Depending on your plan, you may be either paying for minutes or they're using up your allotment, which in some cases means you could end up paying a premium rate for going over. If you're on an "unlimited" plan, this bit is irrelevant but at the same time, the marginal cost of delivering calls is essentially zero once the network capacity exists. If you're roaming on another carrier's network, I'm not sure how the economics work there, but I suspect the other carrier gets paid regardless.
  - NeoTar 2y ago
    The user could be from a country where paying to receive phone-calls is unknown. From some brief Wikipedia research, this is only a common model in the USA, Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiving_party_pays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiving_party_pays)
wilkystyle 2y ago
> I think a different genie is out of the bottle that won't go back in: the expectation you can immediately and synchronously interrupt any person and demand their full attention. Definitely agree with this. Over the past five or so years I have adopted the following approach that ensures have control over 95% of the interruptions: - I have "silence unknown callers" enabled in iOS - Focus mode is on 100% of the time. - I disable notifications for all apps except for Reminders (interruptions I have configured) and the Phone app (calls from people in my contact list). To your last point, the people I am actually interested in talking to only call if something is too important/time sensitive to do via text, so this works well. Any other callers will leave a voicemail if it's actually important.
- Scoundreller 2y ago
  This doesn’t work if you’re on-call (and don’t have a very specific set of numbers that calls could be received from), run a business, looking for work or awaiting vendor calls. Now, do I charge my employer when I get a scam call on the work phone while I’m on-call? Technically I should. Also doesn’t help that callerids get forged to be similar to your own number, which looks like the corporate block of phone numbers we have. Tho I think the networks have someone cut down on the ease of doing that (or at least tagging them as likely fraud).
  - tacocataco 2y ago
    Maybe it's time to go back to pagers.
- matthewdgreen 2y ago
  It's lousy for the elderly, who really suffer from this. Many older people spent their lives with a working phone system, don't really use texting, and expect things to work. So our decision to allow the phone system to descend into fraud is really harmful to them. I dread to think what our society will look like by the time I'm really old.
  - throwup238 2y ago
matheusmoreira 2y ago
> the expectation you can immediately and synchronously interrupt any person and demand their full attention Needs to end as soon as possible. Calling on the phone is one of the most rude things someone can possibly do. https://jameshfisher.com/2017/11/08/i-hate-telephones/ https://jameshfisher.com/2017/11/08/i-hate-telephones/
- xp84 2y ago
  Looking at that article, it’s pretty obvious that the author is experiencing something like severe anxiety (as are some people close to me who share this aversion). While we should be compassionate and accommodating of such people, there are others who are much better able to communicate using voice than with text (heck, including the blind), and we shouldn’t force them to only communicate the way the anxious ones prefer. The telephone already supports two-way “consent” - it doesn’t answer itself and some people choose at their own risk to never answer it. Edit: my point is it’s already not a demand, it’s a notice: somewhere out there, someone thinks either you know something they should hear ASAP, or vice versa. What you do with that is up to you.
  - matheusmoreira 2y ago
    > severe anxiety That's a rather apt description for the feelings that telephones cause. > there are others who are much better able to communicate using voice than with text (heck, including the blind) Voice messages. All modern asynchronous messaging services support them. > it doesn’t answer itself It sure as hell rings loudly all by itself though. It interrupts. Grabs attention. Demands attention. It wakes people up from their precious sleep. For basically no reason whatsoever. Usually because some asshole wants to pitch his products. As a person with attention deficit, I consider that to be a form of violence against me and my mind. I will defend myself from it.
    - EvanAnderson 2y ago
      > It sure as hell rings loudly all by itself though. It interrupts. Grabs attention. Demands attention. It wakes people up from their precious sleep. Isn't this a configuration issue? iOS and Android both have sufficiently nuanced control for do-not-disturb to accommodate a ton of usage scenarios. > As a person with attention deficit, I consider that to be a form of violence against me and my mind. I will defend myself from it. Characterizing an unsolicited phone call as wrong or rude seems backwards to me. I don't see fault being the caller's but rather the recipient's for not availing themselves of the resources at their disposal to control access to their attention.
coldpie 2y ago
> This, plus the monetary incentives are the root reason it's still a problem. I'm skeptical. I think "our network eliminated spam calls" would be a major, major selling point for a mobile network. Like I would definitely consider switching carriers if one of them genuinely solved the problem. Given the amount of mobile network advertising I see, there's gotta be way more money in actually fixing this and gaining new users, than there is in getting a couple fractions of a cent per completed call. It's not even a hard problem to fix. Just have calls sourced internationally set to default-deny for every account. If a user actually wants to receive internationally-sourced calls, they can turn it on. The number of people turning it on would be so small, spammers wouldn't bother at all anymore. Then, prosecute anyone sending spam calls from within the US (I assume we are already doing this). Boom, you've solved the phone spam problem. Now someone go implement it so I can start paying you for your superior product.
- gosub100 2y ago
  Make the "report as spam" button or notification cause the spammer or their sponsor to incur a $0.01 charge payable to the mobile provider. The money would be a rounding error for false accusations, but would decimate anyone sending massive spam calls.
  - metabagel 2y ago
    $0.10 - but you have to actually pick up the call before the "report as spam" button is available. Add a button which is "Hang up and report as spam", and put that button away from the regular hang up button, so it doesn't often get hit accidentally. Also, if the monthly bill is less than $1 in spam charges, then the charges should be dropped. Spam charges aren't intended for one-off annoying calls.
    - gosub100 2y ago
      I want to work on a micro payment system like this but for email. The email is encrypted but not for privacy, for "proof of readability", the key is somehow decrypted off the blockchain only after, say, $0.05 is sent to the recipient. That starts a time delay that auto refunds the micro payment UNLESS spam button is pressed on the client. Then the nickel is claimed. People mailing back and forth will do so for free, because clicking reply will refund the nickel. In theory recipients could set their own price to talk to them. Coins would be real and absolutely redeemable for USD or other coin. To be clear, email content is NOT on the blockchain. Few problems: - have to pay upfront to send messages. - might have problems with liquidity finding traders to redeem with - Major mail providers such as Gmail may block forwarded encrypted content "for security" - would require add-on client to decrypt - people are sick of hearing about shit coins - need very low gas fee shitcoin - if shitcoin server goes down, email goes down I suppose you could do this in a cashless way and just request tokens from a miner. And if you ask for too many, too fast, you get denied or have to pay the miner. The idea would be to distribute them sparsely among people who don't send many messages. Maybe the shitcoin could somehow enforce not holding too many send tokens.
soco 2y ago
An idea which works for me: the 5 close contacts are set to buzzing, everything else is on silent thus has to wait for when I feel like looking at the phone. I also have the answering robot on for those who really have something to tell me (the few). This makes for a quiet day.
6DM 2y ago
Only problem I see is that now that everyone is ignoring calls and focusing on text messages, there's now a lot of spam text messages and that is only going to grow.
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  Does anyone know what "Delete and report junk" actually does on iOS? Is it a placebo button like "Close elevator door" and "Push button to cross street," or does Apple actually do something useful with those reports?
  - mikestew 2y ago
    I have my suspicions that "Delete and report junk" is about as effective as marking email as "junk" in the Apple mail client. That is, the Apple mail client will happily drop junk mail into your inbox no matter how many times you mark mail from foo@bar.com as junk. And yet I have to go dig in the Junk folder to find the shipping confirmation from orders@company_you've_heard_of.com
janalsncm 2y ago
> the expectation you can immediately and synchronously interrupt any person and demand their full attention I agree, and the fact that there are so many other things demanding my attention is crazy making. If I had to guess, a few generations ago this was probably a complaint about the advent of telephones, even without robocallers and telemarketers. Now that spam has reduced the signal to noise ratio, it’s amusing to see this pop back up.

criddell 2y ago

> they get paid by the consumer they’re delivering the call to That doesn’t make any sense. I don’t have the phone so that I can receive spam calls. If they were able to eliminate all spam calls overnight, people wouldn’t cancel their service.

nordsieck 2y ago
> If they were able to eliminate all spam calls overnight, people wouldn’t cancel their service. Are there many people without any phone service?
gregmac 2y ago
Depending on your plan, you may be either paying for minutes or they're using up your allotment, which in some cases means you could end up paying a premium rate for going over. If you're on an "unlimited" plan, this bit is irrelevant but at the same time, the marginal cost of delivering calls is essentially zero once the network capacity exists. If you're roaming on another carrier's network, I'm not sure how the economics work there, but I suspect the other carrier gets paid regardless.
- NeoTar 2y ago
  The user could be from a country where paying to receive phone-calls is unknown. From some brief Wikipedia research, this is only a common model in the USA, Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiving_party_pays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiving_party_pays)

wilkystyle 2y ago

> I think a different genie is out of the bottle that won't go back in: the expectation you can immediately and synchronously interrupt any person and demand their full attention. Definitely agree with this. Over the past five or so years I have adopted the following approach that ensures have control over 95% of the interruptions: - I have "silence unknown callers" enabled in iOS - Focus mode is on 100% of the time. - I disable notifications for all apps except for Reminders (interruptions I have configured) and the Phone app (calls from people in my contact list). To your last point, the people I am actually interested in talking to only call if something is too important/time sensitive to do via text, so this works well. Any other callers will leave a voicemail if it's actually important.

Scoundreller 2y ago
This doesn’t work if you’re on-call (and don’t have a very specific set of numbers that calls could be received from), run a business, looking for work or awaiting vendor calls. Now, do I charge my employer when I get a scam call on the work phone while I’m on-call? Technically I should. Also doesn’t help that callerids get forged to be similar to your own number, which looks like the corporate block of phone numbers we have. Tho I think the networks have someone cut down on the ease of doing that (or at least tagging them as likely fraud).
- tacocataco 2y ago
  Maybe it's time to go back to pagers.
matthewdgreen 2y ago
It's lousy for the elderly, who really suffer from this. Many older people spent their lives with a working phone system, don't really use texting, and expect things to work. So our decision to allow the phone system to descend into fraud is really harmful to them. I dread to think what our society will look like by the time I'm really old.
- throwup238 2y ago

matheusmoreira 2y ago

> the expectation you can immediately and synchronously interrupt any person and demand their full attention Needs to end as soon as possible. Calling on the phone is one of the most rude things someone can possibly do. https://jameshfisher.com/2017/11/08/i-hate-telephones/ https://jameshfisher.com/2017/11/08/i-hate-telephones/

xp84 2y ago
Looking at that article, it’s pretty obvious that the author is experiencing something like severe anxiety (as are some people close to me who share this aversion). While we should be compassionate and accommodating of such people, there are others who are much better able to communicate using voice than with text (heck, including the blind), and we shouldn’t force them to only communicate the way the anxious ones prefer. The telephone already supports two-way “consent” - it doesn’t answer itself and some people choose at their own risk to never answer it. Edit: my point is it’s already not a demand, it’s a notice: somewhere out there, someone thinks either you know something they should hear ASAP, or vice versa. What you do with that is up to you.
- matheusmoreira 2y ago
  > severe anxiety That's a rather apt description for the feelings that telephones cause. > there are others who are much better able to communicate using voice than with text (heck, including the blind) Voice messages. All modern asynchronous messaging services support them. > it doesn’t answer itself It sure as hell rings loudly all by itself though. It interrupts. Grabs attention. Demands attention. It wakes people up from their precious sleep. For basically no reason whatsoever. Usually because some asshole wants to pitch his products. As a person with attention deficit, I consider that to be a form of violence against me and my mind. I will defend myself from it.
  - EvanAnderson 2y ago
    > It sure as hell rings loudly all by itself though. It interrupts. Grabs attention. Demands attention. It wakes people up from their precious sleep. Isn't this a configuration issue? iOS and Android both have sufficiently nuanced control for do-not-disturb to accommodate a ton of usage scenarios. > As a person with attention deficit, I consider that to be a form of violence against me and my mind. I will defend myself from it. Characterizing an unsolicited phone call as wrong or rude seems backwards to me. I don't see fault being the caller's but rather the recipient's for not availing themselves of the resources at their disposal to control access to their attention.

coldpie 2y ago

> This, plus the monetary incentives are the root reason it's still a problem. I'm skeptical. I think "our network eliminated spam calls" would be a major, major selling point for a mobile network. Like I would definitely consider switching carriers if one of them genuinely solved the problem. Given the amount of mobile network advertising I see, there's gotta be way more money in actually fixing this and gaining new users, than there is in getting a couple fractions of a cent per completed call. It's not even a hard problem to fix. Just have calls sourced internationally set to default-deny for every account. If a user actually wants to receive internationally-sourced calls, they can turn it on. The number of people turning it on would be so small, spammers wouldn't bother at all anymore. Then, prosecute anyone sending spam calls from within the US (I assume we are already doing this). Boom, you've solved the phone spam problem. Now someone go implement it so I can start paying you for your superior product.

gosub100 2y ago
Make the "report as spam" button or notification cause the spammer or their sponsor to incur a $0.01 charge payable to the mobile provider. The money would be a rounding error for false accusations, but would decimate anyone sending massive spam calls.
- metabagel 2y ago
  $0.10 - but you have to actually pick up the call before the "report as spam" button is available. Add a button which is "Hang up and report as spam", and put that button away from the regular hang up button, so it doesn't often get hit accidentally. Also, if the monthly bill is less than $1 in spam charges, then the charges should be dropped. Spam charges aren't intended for one-off annoying calls.
  - gosub100 2y ago
    I want to work on a micro payment system like this but for email. The email is encrypted but not for privacy, for "proof of readability", the key is somehow decrypted off the blockchain only after, say, $0.05 is sent to the recipient. That starts a time delay that auto refunds the micro payment UNLESS spam button is pressed on the client. Then the nickel is claimed. People mailing back and forth will do so for free, because clicking reply will refund the nickel. In theory recipients could set their own price to talk to them. Coins would be real and absolutely redeemable for USD or other coin. To be clear, email content is NOT on the blockchain. Few problems: - have to pay upfront to send messages. - might have problems with liquidity finding traders to redeem with - Major mail providers such as Gmail may block forwarded encrypted content "for security" - would require add-on client to decrypt - people are sick of hearing about shit coins - need very low gas fee shitcoin - if shitcoin server goes down, email goes down I suppose you could do this in a cashless way and just request tokens from a miner. And if you ask for too many, too fast, you get denied or have to pay the miner. The idea would be to distribute them sparsely among people who don't send many messages. Maybe the shitcoin could somehow enforce not holding too many send tokens.

soco 2y ago

An idea which works for me: the 5 close contacts are set to buzzing, everything else is on silent thus has to wait for when I feel like looking at the phone. I also have the answering robot on for those who really have something to tell me (the few). This makes for a quiet day.

6DM 2y ago

Only problem I see is that now that everyone is ignoring calls and focusing on text messages, there's now a lot of spam text messages and that is only going to grow.

CamperBob2 2y ago
Does anyone know what "Delete and report junk" actually does on iOS? Is it a placebo button like "Close elevator door" and "Push button to cross street," or does Apple actually do something useful with those reports?
- mikestew 2y ago
  I have my suspicions that "Delete and report junk" is about as effective as marking email as "junk" in the Apple mail client. That is, the Apple mail client will happily drop junk mail into your inbox no matter how many times you mark mail from foo@bar.com as junk. And yet I have to go dig in the Junk folder to find the shipping confirmation from orders@company_you've_heard_of.com

janalsncm 2y ago

> the expectation you can immediately and synchronously interrupt any person and demand their full attention I agree, and the fact that there are so many other things demanding my attention is crazy making. If I had to guess, a few generations ago this was probably a complaint about the advent of telephones, even without robocallers and telemarketers. Now that spam has reduced the signal to noise ratio, it’s amusing to see this pop back up.