Telcos will stop originating high-risk calls. Where there's legitimate business, and the risks are low (including the overwhelming majority of personal / resid

Telcos will stop originating high-risk calls. Where there's legitimate business, and the risks are low (including the overwhelming majority of personal / residential lines, as well as most business / institutional lines), there's absolutely no problem. The key is getting incentives right. Indexing bonding and payouts to the spam level, and having a target, is one way to approach this. The problem with cheap comms, or cheap anything, is that it makes low-return, high-volume activities viable, including especially those which externalise costs and internalise benefits. Such as, say, fraud or spam generally. What my proposal does is internalise those costs to spammer and telcos which facilitate them, by raising effort (most bulk calls are blocked) and shifting the financial incentives. From participating in the fight against spam for the past 30 years I've a pretty good notion that this will work. And unlike email, the phone system already has a costing and payment system built in. With single spam operations generating hundreds of millions to billions of calls monthly and barely achieving profitability, I'm pretty sure we can knock things back a lot without inconveniencing legitimate players.