I'd also suggest that there be a rebate per spam call delivered. Say, $10/call to the customer.
Telcos could seek 10x that from the upstream who peered the call.
That is, there's a protection and credit to both the end-recipient and the telco provider, which might make the politics of such policy or legislation more widely palatable.
I've thought about that type of spam refund scheme many times and I like it but the potential problem I see with it is the unintended effect of even more spam that you can't ignore by the companies you already have a business relationship with that bill you monthly.
E.g. You get a monthly bill from Comcast to pay for cable tv. With a new hypothetical "spam refund" law, they now abuse it to their advantage by adding a new "Customer Information Updates" fee for $5 to the bill. (They won't call it "marketing fee" or "promotional fee" but something innocuous like "information fee".) The cable company can now can send you more spam by using the "spam refund" law against you.
But... the customer can get a "rebate" on that extra $5 fee by responding to spam and "refunding" it back to the cable company. If the customer chooses to ignore the spam and never refund it, the customer ends up paying the $5 extra fee on the monthly bill. The customer is now paying oneself to to receive more spam that they can't ignore.
A potential spam refund scheme needs protections to prevent abuse like the above.
No, people don't want to pollute their contacts listing by adding every company they have a billing relationship as a new entry to "manage spam". It's visual pollution to have "Comcast" as a useless entry alphabetically in between "Charlie" and "David" just to offset a new spam rebate scheme because Comcast is abusing the law. And if Comcast has multiple identities such as creating "Comcast Updates" and "Comcast New Channels", etc to further abuse the spam rebate scheme for more customer "engagement", you're doing even more digital housekeeping and adding more entries to the contacts listing.
Another problem is that the smartphone's "contacts listing" is a special area that has downstream interactions with other smartphone settings to manage/filter notifications and sounds. E.g. "silence notifications not in contact listing" or "block calls not in contact listing". By adding Comcast into the contacts listing, they can become even more invasive in your life by polluting alerts on your home screen and making your phone ring.
The spam rebate idea can have some weird unintended side effects if such a scheme (or law) is not crafted carefully to prohibit abuse and make life worse.
Yes, we would need to update how we handle transactional emails. No, this would not need to be difficult or even frequently user facing.
This presumes a few advances, such as reliable caller-ID systems (this is presently not the case for North Amercian dialing systems). Friends who are innundated with robocalls noted that they'd received a call spoofing an entity with whom they do have a relationship, however it was clear from the call characteristics that it was not a legitimate call --- among other factors, the caller identified themselves as being from a different entity, which is a pretty low bar.
The problem of mega-services (financial, comms, federal government, etc.) being subject to spoofing simply because so many people have interactions / relationships with them is an extant problem. But odds are pretty good that your local water / sewer / trash / gas / electric service will be less universal, and knowing that they're calling when they do in fact call is useful.
It seems you're associating a contacts list with a friends list. That's not the case. Your contacts are, well, your contacts, and different contacts have different roles. Among other factors, you might set, say, different contact rules, priorities, and ringtones for, say, immediate family, work, casual social contacts, and business entities. The latter would generally not be permitted to call outside regular business hours, and you might specifically restrict them around mealtimes or other inconvenient times of day (redirecting to voicemail or another messaging service, say).
The Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system charges 10¢ per page. Every month, balances under $10.00 (edit: apparently it's $30.00 per quarter) are forgiven. It strikes me that a similar model could be employed. Are there people who send more than 100 unsolicited texts per month? More than 200?
And to be clear I'm not talking 'normal' as in 'median' I'm talking 'human using their thumbs'. Even if you spend all day every day hunting down craigslist bargains and coordinating swaps
Keep in mind that egregious robocall providers have been making billions of calls annually (55 billion in 2023: <https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/16/americans-received-55-mi...>), whilst a typical instance was unable to pay a $10 million fine (<https://therecord.media/ftc-settles-with-company-that-facili...>). At that rate, a per-call ding of only $0.0002 (2 hundredths of a cent) might prove sufficient. A penny-per-call penalty should actually be relatively effective against the lowest of the bottom-feeders, though a higher rate would afford additional protections.
The American phone pricing model, charging for "airtime" is absurd
It means that a spammer can pay $10 for 1000s of calls while the same customer receiving the call pays much more than that per minute
It is frankly ridiculous
They already can. There's an internal "billing" code for every call so carrier knows who to bill for having carried that call.
They don't want to "prove who sent it" because all those billing transactions for carrying those calls add up to significant profit, and they don't want to kill that profit if they don't have to.
Telcos already know where the connections come from and who to bill for what. Someone just needs to mandate it.
I'd suggest it be optional on a per-customer basis, perhaps with a whitelist.
E.g., the only international calls I ever want to receive comes from family members' cell phones when they're traveling.
I'm 100% okay with blocking all other international calls. If something is that important, they can send me something via mail, FedEx, etc., or send a message courier to my house.
Just make it so you can opt-in to an exception and nobody will care. If you live in the EU and want to call me (as if you know my number, and have reason to call me) you won't have a problem. If you live in Russia you might have a problem - but I have no reason to think anyone in Russia will ever call me so I don't care. The few people who do have friends in Russia can add an exceptions and those exceptions are not enough for spammers to bother operating at all anymore.
This already works: a staple of these threads is some European user who has sender-pays service expressing surprise that this is a problem because it’s so rare in their experience. Those countries can still receive international calls.