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Comment by idDriven | Hacker News Reader

My guess is this is leading up to a PR campaign where the industry will make a big deal about how seriously they are tackling the 'newly discovered' issue as an attempt to undercut a push for actual governmental oversight and regulation.

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I mean, if they fix the problem, why would you be upset the government wasn't involved? If the problem persists, we can always have the conversation again. Barring anything else, government solutions tend to be inflexible (which is a feature, but should be much more selectively used).

Because the moment people aren't focused on the issue, it will return.

I doubt it. It may mutate, but regulation has never stopped that sort of thing. If anything, it gains legitimacy by finding a loophole (technical compliance), and it's unlikely anyone will build the political capital to amend the law. And even if they did, it will just mutate yet again.

Look at net neutrality, the official corporate statement is of course they support and free and open internet. However "According to lobbying disclosures filed with the U.S. Senate and reviewed by Sludge, Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and their largest trade groups, the Internet and Television Association (NCTA) and CTIA, have spent $190.3 million on lobbying the FCC and other government bodies, much of it to reverse net neutrality, since the 2015 rules were passed."

Source: https://readsludge.com/2018/06/11/today-net-neutrality-offic...

And the net result of that is what? Why would any business want to have regulations passed dictating what they can do? You can support a free, open internet and still not want regulations dictating your behavior. They aren't mutually exclusive.

ATT own FCC; they're not scared of "oversight and regulation" because their lawyers write all of that stuff. ISTM this is more likely to be starting a campaign against NN or even the sort of interconnection we see from VOIP providers or other services like Twilio.

"Can you imagine?! Our CEO got a call that appeared to be from his golf buddy, so he interrupted some interview. Only, and here's the amazing part, it wasn't actually from his golf buddy! It turns out that some evil hackers have subverted the strong security of SS7 to place calls that appear to be from phone numbers assigned to other parties! We can fix this if we get a $1 payment from the VOIP provider every time we terminate a VOIP call."

Or the wireless and traditional wireline players will make a case to the FCC that the bad actors are the VoIP-over-public-Internet providers and such providers alone require special oversight and regulation.

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