This is a market-based problem rather than a policy problem: The problem is the low cost of making calls.
Make calls cost money and the problem will naturally go away.
Make calls cost money and the problem will naturally go away.
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...
So even if you track someone down, what will you do if they are dirt poor?
Free, unlimited phone calls is a fairly recent thing.
This is not a technical problem at all.
In other words: yes, and many people also paid for their email accounts for some years. Yet here we are...
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.
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. :(
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.
See Call Pumping: https://www.fcc.gov/general/traffic-pumping
I assume most calls are not successful, but over a thousand calls how much can a scammer expect to make?
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.
You don’t need a lot of money to spam calls.
It wasn’t always this way, and getting random BS calls almost never happened back then.
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.
This is not a law enforcement problem, because this problem only became common once phone calls were virtually free to make.
A lot of problems would be solved if phone calls are billable. Then the telcos would be fighting amongst themselves to make sure that they get paid.
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.
And what well-funded SIGs are our to get your phone call tax plan?
By way of indirect response, Bernard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations" (1937):
https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...
In Markdown: https://pastebin.com/raw/Bapu75is