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.

Yup.

I didn’t realize how bad it got until my father stopped answering calls. It turned out he was getting (no hyperbole) 90 calls a day from spammers and vendors he had no relationship with.

I used the iOS filter, the AT&T filter, and turned on the shortcut so the phone doesn’t ring unless the caller is in his contacts.

The problem is that it already changed his behavior. He doesn’t answer the phone anymore, even if it is a person he recognizes. The Pavlovian response to his ringtone is still very negative.

I’m sure there is a non-trivial percentage of the US who already viscerally hates receiving phone calls.

Can you share those countermeasures you mentioned? I haven’t been able to find anything for the iPhone.