FCC bars providers for non-compliance with robocall protections

At this point I'm firmly of the opinion that "leak this 10 digit code and anyone on the planet can call me relentlessly" is just a broken model. Maybe that worked better when the calls carried a significant cost, but clearly the scammers are able to do this sort of thing at scale.

In practice of course, my phone is 100% permanently in "do not disturb" mode and does not ring at all unless I've added you to my contact list. Which means the scammer, already pretending to live in small town rural USA (where they most certainly are not) has to correctly guess the number of one of my relatives before my pocket actually rings. It also means I'm unreachable for anything actually important that isn't in my contact list. That's an annoying price.

I'm not sure what the correct end solution is, but the current solution seems to be very broken.

Imagine if the concept of a phone call did not exist. We still have these computers in our pockets, but without the history of the telephone system.

Then, one day, an app developer thought: Wouldn't it be cool if there was an app that would interrupt what the user was doing, play a sound, vibrate the device, and put up a full-screen dialog, that this all could be activated remotely by any other device by simply typing in a short numeric code, and that if the recipient pushed a button, the remote attacker could send audio data and activate the recipient's microphone? Most app stores would classify this as malware, yet here we are today with devices that all have built-in apps that do exactly this, and only because of how normalized the legacy idea of a "phone call" is.