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.

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

I think one of two high-level approaches:

We could be ultra-strict about who is allowed to call whom, and have penalties and enforcement similar to how we police credit card fraud.

Or, we could do away with phone numbers and instead come up with a scheme where you show a QR-like code to allow someone to call you; and then you can revoke that permission if/when it is abused.

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Finally, I think the crux of the problem is that in the US we tolerate far too much of this kind of behavior. (Unsolicited contact for the purpose of sales.) Without a corresponding publicity campaign, there's far too much cultural tolerance of allowing anyone to contact anyone at any time for any reason to accept the kind of change needed to truly contain SPAM.

Very simple: charge caller $0.25 to make a call.

That's how it was before about 1980. Every call outside the local area cost money, and every international call cost a lot more. As a result, spam landline calls were rare and international spam calls were nonexistent.

Keep in mind this was the era before CallerID so you never knew what number was calling you in advance. You answered every call on blind faith. And strangely enough most calls were worth taking, because all calls cost money.

Spam happens when it costs the spammer nothing.