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Comment by mola | Hacker News Reader

If Robocalls are the problem, Truecaller isn't the solution. Regulations against unwanted harassment is. Robocalls are not a force of nature where our only recourse is a technological solution. They are a result of a human choice, where the absolute majority of individual think it's a menace. So our recourse is legal. band-aid solutions like Truecaller cause more problems. The Truecaller product is not a usual commodity where you choose it, and pay a known price. The actual price you pay is totally unknown. Because they require total access to your device without genuine disclosure of their intended use for it.

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In essence, this is the spam debate all over again, with some extra seasoning. (The permissions are incidental - other apps exist that are polite in this respect.) So, out comes the canned spam response:

Your post advocates a

( ) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea.)

(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money (X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email (X) Open relays in foreign countries (X) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (X) Asshats (X) Jurisdictional problems (X) Extreme profitability of spam (X) Technically illiterate politicians (X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.

> Lack of centrally controlling authority for email

That's the key difference with phones - phone numbers and call are (quasi-)centrally controlled - by your network provider. A simple legislative solution is just "user gets $10 discount on their phone bill for each spam call" and watch the problem solve itself...

(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money

Where does the $10 come from? (Who pays it? Who collects it?) Also, you just invoked a Cobra Effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

Users collect $10 from their network operator by filling a claim in an online form. Burden of proof on the network operator to prove it wasn't a spam call (e.g. originated from a known number, lasted more than some number of minutes, metadata indicates that it was a two-way conversation, etc.). Huge fines if users complain to the regulator that any of the above isn't true.

Cue the beginning of a spam robo-call (or more accurately, robo-receive) industry purely for the purpose of collecting this $10 for every call received.

This would be difficult to write as a law and very difficult to enforce, though I like the idea of the burden of proof being on the operator.

In India we have a national DND (Do Not Disturb) registry that anyone can signup for and choose whether to receive marketing communications or not, and what categories therein. The regulator has made the operators enforce the reporting mechanism along with penalties (monetary and otherwise) on the marketers for violations. But still, there are cases where a marketer may claim that the person receiving the call/SMS opted for it and signed up or had some transactional relationship with the company.

> Who pays it? Who collects it?

My only guess is that you misunderstand what is being proposed. The spammer is not part of the transaction.

In which case, how in the world will anyone sane consent to "I didn't like this call - prove me wrong or give me $10"? (Yes, yes, make a law, I got that. Good luck getting that passed.)

This thread is not about a voluntary payment, and we don’t typically get to choose which laws we consent to. So I don’t know what you are asking.

Once the law is in effect, that is. First, it needs to be passed - and then, not shot down as unconstitutional. Moving the burden of proof to the operator (a third party! Not even one of the endpoints) sounds...very brave.

This is response is a total straw man argument. I was talking about robo calls, your response is about difficulties with email spam.

The phone network is controlled centrally. Government can force handling spam by phone companies, the same way they can force them to give police call logs etc for the purpose of collecting evidence.

Further more, Robocalls usually are of a more local nature (not international). Government may instruct Police to investigate origins of Robocalls and enforce sanctions. A formal complaint process could be made , where any end user may file a complaint, Providing proof is trivial. Both for the act, and origin (Robocalls are advertising a specific product from a specific company.) A law could be made which mandates a speedy process for filing relevant lawsuites with small claims court, if found guilty the offending party will be levied a large fine.

This is from the top of my head. It probably contains many flaws. But it certainly doesn't seem impossible to combat Robocalls.

As a German I've never received a robo-call in my life. Germany is the 4th largest economy in the world, so it's not like we are just under the radar either. I have no idea what we are doing right, but I am willing to bet it's a legislative solution.

At the end of the day, someone somewhere is granting robocallers access to the public telephone network. Hold those service providers legally responsible until they start taking action - it's not like there is no way to find out who they are.

A shell company, operating out of Vanuatu, with VoIP servers in Vietnam and Venezuela? Gl;hf.

International phone calls aren't free and unrestricted. It's quite feasible to arrange a regime where such inbound spam calls are economically unfeasible, and legally unfeasible within a regulatory regime e.g. apply large financial penalties to the originating phone company, of which there's a limited number, all are licensed, and can be prohibited from obtaining new licenses.

At some point those VoIP servers connect to PSTN. Someone is responsible for that.

The non-spammy network operators that interconnect to the spammy network operators make money through that interconnection. If you want them to disconnect their spammy customers, you have to convince them that it's worth it to lose them. This is a manual process and takes time.

This is where infrastructure level legislation comes in. They should be required to provide the full originator information all the way to the people who receive the call, they should block known spammers, they should block other networks that do not do this, and they should be fined heavily if they do not. Otherwise the phone system will become a relic.

It also seems to be a problem unique to location. I have never in my life received a robo call in Australia but I did start to get sales calls until I put my number on the do not call list.

While I agree with your sentiment, in practice, relying on legislative options is not foolproof and is also a band-aid. You require a lot of human cooperation which, to be honest, is not trivial to achieve in 2019. Second, technology frequently outpaces legislative actions. You can relay a spam call/sms around the world and the receiver, her ISP or her government would still be completely unable to fix the issue.

Honestly, I want disposable phone numbers (which are still compatible with public networks) something akin to email aliases. So if one number gets a lot of spam calls, I can just route it to /dev/null.

We need a complete array of legislative + technological solutions.

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