FCC bars providers for non-compliance with robocall protections

The PSTN is simply not sustainable. It’s a relic of a time when there was no practical way to authenticate or validate calls. Today, with malicious actors able to dial in from anywhere in the world at negligible cost, the system is fundamentally unequipped to handle the abuse it faces.

Efforts like STIR/SHAKEN exist, but they’re little more than a band-aid—and not a particularly effective one—because the underlying network was never designed with resilience or trust in mind.

I know some people push back on this view, often pointing to edge cases where PSTN’s ubiquity still provides value. But as trust in the system erodes, so does its relevance. And if the majority of people already avoid answering calls from numbers they don’t recognize, its practical utility is clearly diminished.

This is a corollary to Chesterton’s fence. unsignedint’s public good.

If you can’t explain the benefit then you can’t tear it down. The PSTN guarantees that all telco operators interoperate. Without it you get what happened with instant messaging. AKA walled gardens. You take for granted the ability to call an iPhone with an Android.

The FCC is responsible for maintaining trust, which they have done here. They can incentivize telco providers to curb the spam activity. You don’t need to throw the baby out with the bath water.

I think Chesterton’s fence is a fair analogy—but it only works if the “fence” still serves a protective function. With the PSTN, the fence is riddled with holes, and the people meant to maintain it can’t keep up with the erosion. Interoperability was indeed its greatest strength, but today that same universality is what lets malicious actors reach everyone at trivial cost.

Comparing PSTN to instant messaging walled gardens is interesting, but I’d argue the real parallel is email: a federated, open standard that also suffers from spam and abuse, yet still manages to limp along thanks to heavy filtering and layered trust systems. The PSTN never evolved those trust layers; instead, it relied on scarcity (call cost, geographic constraints) to keep abuse in check. Once those costs collapsed, the trust model collapsed with them.

As for the FCC, sure, they can try to incentivize carriers. But the fact that we need constant regulatory intervention just to keep basic trust afloat suggests the system is no longer structurally sound. Band-aids like STIR/SHAKEN prove the point: we’re bolting authentication onto a protocol that never envisioned it. That might extend its life a little, but it doesn’t make the foundation any less fragile.

So the question isn’t whether the PSTN once had value (it did, massively), but whether preserving it now delivers more value than the cost of propping it up. If a good chunk of people already treat unknown calls as spam until proven otherwise, then the social contract around the PSTN has already been broken.

> Comparing PSTN to instant messaging walled gardens is interesting, but I’d argue the real parallel is email: a federated, open standard that also suffers from spam and abuse, yet still manages to limp along thanks to heavy filtering and layered trust systems.

I think you're absolutely right to draw that parallel. But, today's email landscape isn't much of a federated open standard. It's a web of trust and distrust, filters, and deliverability issues. It's real work to maintain an email server and attain high deliverability with other email services. So much so that most don't even do it anymore. Most email is just delivered by a few large providers.

Really, email is suffering from a lot of the same issues that PSTN also suffers from. But email providers just decided to "solve" the problem themselves, mostly by taking a heavy hand at blocking things and deciding they don't really care if you're not a big provider.

Yes, absolutely — I’m not suggesting email is anywhere near perfect or free of abuse. But at least collectively, the layers of filtering, reputation systems, and standards make it usable for most people most of the time.

The key difference for me is that the PSTN moves at a snail’s pace, maybe because of regulatory entanglements, maybe because of interoperability constraints. The result is that problems which have been rampant for decades — spoofing, spam, robocalls — remain trivial to exploit. Email has plenty of its own problems here, but at least you get more signals to work with (headers, DKIM/SPF/DMARC, filtering, etc.) than just a string of 10–12 digits with no real context.

That’s why I’m less inclined to “cherish” a system whose shortcomings shift so much burden onto the end user’s well-being, all in the name of interoperability. If interoperability means putting up with abuse at this scale, then that interoperability isn’t worth much — and that’s where my frustration comes from.

Why are you so eager to give up interoperability when it’s not the problem? Spam exists within walled gardens too. Interoperability and spam are orthogonal.