Call it the Penny for Sanity Tax: a 1-cent tax on every call made. Fifty billion robocalls would cost $500 million—a powerful incentive to stop.
I would add that you could have a feature where the recipient of a call could press a button to forgive the tax. That way, the tax would fall even less on legitimate callers.
But my guess is that the cost of collecting the tax would be prohibitive. Many robocalls originate in foreign countries. I saw a story in the WSJ about the FCC’s collection rate on fines that it has levied against known violators of the law. It’s pathetically low.
My suggestion would be to offer a prize for a firm that develops an effective phone spam filter. I might define an effective spam filter as one that does not delay calls for more than 1/4 of a second, that filters out at least 95 percent of robocalls that get through existing filters (such as they are) at major phone service providers, and that filters out no more than 1 out of 1000 legitimate calls.
Maybe the government could offer the prize. Or maybe someone will just put up a GoFundMe and see if those of us who hate robocalls will put money where are mouths are.
My only – my ONLY – reservation, is that it will eventually get noticed as a source of revenue.
The Iron Law of Taxation states that where the taxed have no direct say in the rate, the rate increases until revenue is maximized. This level is known because the zeroth law states that taxes increase beyond the level of maximum revenue.
Perhaps structure it as a VAT: company A does not have to pay the tax fro X calls if the company that originated the calls (at least as a “next hop” in the chain of forwarding) documents that it paid the tax for X calls it sent to company A.
The reason this is a problem is that we have allowed virtually free and anonymous access to the voice networks. Large blocks of numbers are owned by companies like Google, and can be assigned to end-users without registration to a verified entity.
You can’t enforce any regulations or taxes for voice networks until U.S. voice nodes are traceable to known entities. Enforcing that is probably all that is required to inject accountable behavior into the system.
Years ago, email spam was an annoyance to regular people. With modern email systems, spam is generally no longer a bother. That was solved through technology. Robocalls are basically phone spam, it’s a very similar problem, and we can have similar technical solutions.
This not a similar problem, due to the intrinsic nature of the communication. You do not receive the message in advance. You can’t review the data, then decide if the message is worthy of your attention. All you receive is an invitation to begin a real time communication.
There’s a simple solution — voice calls from unknown numbers (not in your contacts list) go directly to voice mail. That’s already my informal system. I just don’t answer a call from anybody I don’t recognize. They can leave voicemail or not. If it’s legit, I’ll call back. But almost everybody I know texts or emails anyway.
Using text or email is another good point. Email solves both the problems and constraints of space and time, whereas the older system of synchronous voice telecommunication only solves space and solves time for the caller at the possible expense of the called.
That is a common strategy. It is essentially downshifting communication modes, from voice to voice mail for unknown calls, giving you the power to do the equivalent spam filtering.
The Lib in me thinks this should NOT be a gov’t issue, but the conservative says a gov’t prize would be a good start to get the tech race going for phone spam reduction.
I’d guess that, like malware databases of “byte signatures” of known potentially bad byte streams, there would develop a list of “bad (spam) phone numbers”. This would lead to “private numbers”.
Well, a tax on “private numbers”, including all foreign private numbers, should be easier to administer — since the phone company is billing the owner of the private number and knows who it is.
Plus, the phone owner should have an easy choice of screen all private numbers or not.
The Nomorobo service was developed in response to just such a government challenge, from the FTC several years ago.
I have an even more clever suggestion – a phone service where when you push a button you charge the caller money for bothering you.
Ideally you could even make it so that you can make money this way by becoming a “honey trap” of sorts for telemarketers and robocalls. It would wipe out the business of telemarketing quickly, I would think.
The idea of letting the recipient receive a credit for every call taken is interesting.
On balance, those who make more outgoing calls than receive incoming calls still pay, as everyone does now. But those that receive more incoming calls than make outgoing calls get paid. The rules would have the be equal regardless of the number of calls made – no bulk discounts.
This should kill cold calling and encourage people to use telephones sensibly.
If it were created as a tax or fine on the “carrier”, then it would be the “carriers” responsibility to enforce.
No need for tax, no need for technology we have all tech and law we need.
Use caller ID. The phone caller provides caller ID.
The phone company also offers a unique caller ID, the 1CentPerCall company. The phone company enforces the charge, collects a third of a cent per call extra, callee gets the rest. Any robocaller can use the 1CentPerCall ID, or even the new 3CentPerID caller ID.
Pareto efficient, everyone wins because important robocalls can pay their way through.
How about you have to pay the person you call instead of the government.
The underlying problem here is that the largest phone companies, through lobbying, have forced on the whole country a signaling protocol (SS7) which enables any caller who has his/its own PBX to fake caller ID, and which doesn’t provide any easy way to detect or block such spoofed calls. Phone companies want junk calls to keep going through, because to the phone company they are revenue.
The incentive that will stop them is to start fining phone companies for every unwanted call their customers receive.
The PCM pioneer Alec Reeves said in 1967 at a lecture in Basildon on 8 February 1967
>The telecom “explosion” could do harm as well as good. Telecom gives couplings. (showing Slides 1 and 2 : tuned cct, couplings.)
If the circuits are tightly coupled, you get a similar response curve as to each – if they are loosely coupled then you get two response curves. However if they have just the right coupling then you get a curve which is something completely new.<
http://www.alecharleyreeves.com