The Patriot Post® · Robocallers Now an FCC Target

We’ve all been there: sitting down to a family dinner only to be interrupted by the ringing of our cell phone. It’s an “unknown caller,” or maybe it’s a call from our local area code. Moments later, another call, this time to our spouse’s phone.

Robocalls are a nuisance, particularly just before an election, but these annoying calls have also been costly to unsuspecting recipients. Preying mainly on the elderly and the working-class, scammers posing as law enforcement, utility companies, or the IRS have bilked Americans out of billions of dollars. Using a technique known as “spoofing,” they appear as local or regional on the caller ID, but they’re actually located thousands of miles away, with a single operator often launching dozens or hundreds of calls simultaneously from a laptop computer.

While there’s a certain segment of the public that delights in giving these spam callers a dose of their own medicine, the problem is so bad that robocalls now rank as the FCC’s top complaint. On average, American households are hit with 17 robocalls a month, according to one telecommunications company, and it’s made us a nation of call screeners.

This avalanche of robocalls has been enabled in part by a government edict demanding the completion of as many mobile calls as possible. Carriers felt they had no choice but to comply, although they were assisted somewhat by a previous FCC exemption for obviously fake phone numbers — those with an incorrect number of digits, repeating numbers, or non-functional area codes. Certain carriers have also made free robocall-blocking services such as Robokiller and Nomorobo available to their customers.

But the next stage of this battle may come when the FCC meets in June. Saying that Americans are “fed up with illegal robocalls,” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai stated the obvious: “We believe we need to make it easier for phone companies to block these robocalls.” Pai’s idea would be to create a system where calls are blocked by default with, for example, a customer’s contact list serving as a whitelist for allowed calls.

It could also be that the FCC is trying to beat Congress, which has its own proposal called the TRACED Act. Among other things, TRACED would mandate that phone companies use a protocol known as SHAKEN/STIR, which would ensure that calls are coming from where they claim and would facilitate faster tracing of illegal calls.

In either case, opponents of the new regulations, led by FCC member Michael O'Rielly, insist that a “careful and nuanced approach” is necessary so as not to weed out legitimate robocallers, such as the ones reminding you of an upcoming doctor appointment or that your prescription is ready at the local pharmacy. Of course, as The Wall Street Journal also pointed out, “ACA International, a trade group representing collection agencies, said Wednesday it supports efforts to combat illegal calls but ‘consumer harm results when legitimate business calls are blocked or mislabeled and people do not receive critical, sometimes exigent information they need.’”

With new regulations, though, we’re sure to see new black-hat technologies that create or hijack peoples’ whitelists and move undesirable entities onto them — for a price, of course. In that respect, perhaps University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds was a man ahead of his time when he argued that robocallers should pay for his attention. “Under my proposal, any incoming calls from people not on my contact list wouldn’t go through unless the caller paid me something,” wrote Reynolds. “Twenty-five cents would probably be enough to discourage phone spammers, who make huge numbers of (mostly futile) calls.” (Maybe it goes as a credit to our ever-increasing wireless bills.)

Why allow millions in unpaid fines to the FCC, when this barrier to entry would be enough to dissuade all but the most important callers? Such a free-market solution would also lend new meaning to the old song, “Here’s A Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares).”