I did mean Christian Slater. Although after being blown away by Bacon's performance in White Water Summer I can't help but wonder how much darker Pump Up the Volume would be with Bacon cast as the lead.
I think the problem is that it's possible to spoof called ID. The fraud starts before you answer the phone.
Caller ID used to be an extra charge. The telcos needed it not to be mandatory. But now my land line is going away because it's become nothing but an annoyance. They could have prevented that but... but...
They would prefer not having to maintain their infrastructure as a utility for landlines. They would much prefer you just kept using your wireless phone where the margins are much higher.
I think the major fault with this reasoning is that the exact same solution has been proposed many times for e-mail, going back decades, and has never come even close to catching on. I think that applying a cost - whether time or money - to producing phone calls would fail for the same reasons. Namely, the significant difficulty in making significant changes to the telephone system (e.g. changing requirements to make a call, something which has almost never happened in the history of the phone system) and the lack of incentives for the telcos to do so, considering that they make termination fees off of these spam calls.
Yes, but these charges were all imposed by the telco for end users, and special arrangements for large customers have been the norm since the AT&T breakup. There is no facility to ensure that _all_ calls have paid a fee because many customers have, for decades, had arrangements to make calls with no fee required, and in general there has been no reason for a telco to have a mechanism to monitor another telco's billing practices.
In other words: yes, and many people also paid for their email accounts for some years. Yet here we are...
I agree with your basic point: that this is a problem that's enabled by low-cost telecoms. We already saw that movie, in the 1990s, in Usenet and Email spam. And we know how it ends. Spoilers: everyone dies.
The problem with your proposed solution is that you're going to have an awfully hard time rebottling that genie. We've got low-cost comms. And within the triple entente of costs, infrastructure, and network effects, you're going to see those re-emerge, whether on the PSTN old-school phone network (inclusive of mobile and VOIP), or on some replacement.
Infrastructure, because you're talking about billions of subscribers. Even a limited network is tens to hundreds of millions. (Numbers for online community services are similar.)
Costs, because users will migrate to the low-cost solution, all else being equal. If regulation requires a cost floor on one network, you'll see migrations elsewhere, and legislation and regulation virtually always lag.
Network effects, because an effective and attractive network is either extraordinarily selective (The Harvard Face Book), or universal (Facebook). Much of the actual systemic value comes not from what the vendor or service provider, er, provides, but from what the users bring to the network. And a large network makes up for a lot of crud in other areas.
(Corollary: the replacement service is almost certain to emerge within some elite niche, and then spread out, as did writing, literacy, publishing, telephony, the Internet, mobile phones, smartphones, and social networking.)
(Corollary: alternatives which start out with the spammers and marketers already on-board and running rampant will likely fail to make the cut.)
Increasing costs across the board won't work.
Oh, and you've got a whole mass of vested interests propping up the current system. I've already linked Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations", but the logic expressed there largely applies, and the paper itself includes several comms-based examples.
Increasing costs for malfeasance, most especially at the service provider level, probably through some charge-back or penalty scheme, with (excellent suggestion from, er, you, by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21494014) a bounty available to third parties, could well be part of that.
A basic outline which you'll also find widely repeated through history.
Markets caused this problem through externalities, informational asymmetries, vested power relationships, sunk costs, network effects, and perverse incentives. You're not going to solve the problem by marketing it harder.
Telcos are not incentivized to do much about this problem because they get paid by the scammers to complete their calls. As long as telcos continue to make money from these fraudulent calls, the problem will continue to exist.
I'm not even sure that raising the floor cost of making calls would help because scammers only have to swindle a single person out of thousands of dollars to offset the costs. :(
It depends on rate center - remember those free conference services - they often used rate centers which were rural so they had a higher termination charge, which meant that the service was profitable.
While I'm having trouble finding hard rates - with the big carriers, I know its not a ton of money now in any case - low enough that I dont think the financial incentive is a relevant course of action, it just subsidizes the trunking infrastructure needed to support the calls.
No, this is a problem where the necessary resources used to punish white collar crime are not being allocated.
If there was a known Florida-based drug dealer that was bringing in $120,000,000 of drugs/year, there'd be dozens of cops working around the clock to bring him in.
A Florida-based robo-caller, fined $120,000,000, who isn't paying a penny? Nobody cares.
I understand lack of enforcement against some robocall firm incorporated on Mars, or somewhere else beyond the reach of law enforcement. I don't understand the lack of enforcement against ones based in the US. Jail them, take their homes and cars, put their kids up in foster care.
To be fair $120 million in drugs and $120 million in uncollected fines are apples and oranges. The drug money is financing murdering drug cartels that have brought Mexico to their knees. Robocalls are kind of not on the same level as funding human-trafficking, murderous cartels.
That's fine. We have a solution for people who don't have the full amount of a fine.
We take every penny that they do have.
Since the guy hasn't paid a cent, and is not living under a bridge, panhandling with a "Homeless veteran, please give me money for food" sign, I'm pretty sure that this is a problem with enforcement.
> You don’t need a lot of money to spam calls.
No, but you do get a lot of money from the people buying ad time from you.
The technological and legislative infrastructure required to turn this into a market far exceeds what would be required for simpler anti-spam measures. It comes across as unhelpful and detached, like suggesting world peace as the solution to gang violence in your neighborhood.
There is nothing simpler, except that some very well-funded special interest groups never want to see this happen.
When I was on a limited plan, the amount of spam messages and calls were virtually zero because the limit would run up and be charged against the caller (internationally).
The month I switched to an unlimited, I started getting spammed.
Now much of the spam is domestic, but I fail to see how this is possibly unfeasible technically.
Why should we artificially charge law abiding people for making a call? Why not disallow call spoofing? Why should we allow telecom fraud, especially when there are obvious technical solutions?
And what well-funded SIGs are our to get your phone call tax plan?
