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Comment by perlgeek | Hacker News Reader

This might work for domestic calls, but what about international ones? Do you really want to force telcos to block all calls from countries that you cannot collect fines from?

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The US market is big enough to essentially cause its own "Brussels effect". (It already did in other areas) If the choice for some external telco is "deal with spam or lose access to call the US", any legit company will choose the first one. Or they can follow the same fine collection rules themselves.

Most countries will not have a problem with it since they want to have the correct data anyway and are not a source of SPAM. The countries that are not fine with it are countries most of the US doesn't want to deal with anyway.

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.

> Do you really want to force telcos to block all calls from countries that you cannot collect fines from?

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.

Yes. They don’t peer with every other company in the world directly so it would be written into the existing contracts between the major companies, who would collect from their smaller peers.

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.

I imagine instead of blocking you'd see peering agreements with very stringent terms around allowable portion of calls fined as spam.

I'd love if receiving international calls only worked on an opt-in basis, maybe opting in for each originating country. I think most people in America would have no reason to opt-in. Of course, American corps using overseas call centers would be inconvenienced, but screw them anyway.

They can collect the fine themselve, by billing it to the other country operator.

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