Comment by cjbgkagh
2 years ago
I think that is intentional, AFAIK phone communication is more protected than other types so allowing spam to continue unabated is in the governments interest. Outsourcing the harassment to 3rd parties, similar to how prison torture is outsourced to the inmates. The government could fix these things but would rather not.
I think we just don't have very much competition in telecommunications so things never get fixed. Why bother? It's easier to extract rent off largely the same offerings as the rest of your market (difficult to understand pricing tiers that function as a congestion tax more than a transaction, often region-specific monopolies or duopolies, indistinguishable quality of service) and bring home large profits, market efficiency damned.
Yes, I'm exaggerating. No, it's not by much.
Almost no-one is pro-spam, it’s pretty much universally hated, and in many cases it’s already illegal so it’s more of a matter of enforcement. It is also trivial to detect.
Sure there probably is some regulatory capture but if anything at all can be regulated it’s spam calls / messages. If the government can’t regulate spam then what could it be expected to regulate.
The general population is increasing worried about scam calls for their elderly relatives, it’s already a big deal.
> Almost no-one is pro-spam
In fact there are really only two groups that are pro-spam: spammers, obviously, and the entities that provide them services from which they may spam.
Oh sure basically any provider of any service be it phone, web hosting, email, etc. will say they don't want spammers, and the email providers may actually mean it what with them not wanting their server's scores trashed and be unable to get email to anyone (though plenty others don't give a shit), but website hosts, telephone companies, and SMS providers? They utterly do not care and in fact go out of their way to not know when spammers are (mis)using their services.
Meanwhile like that other commenter said, everyone is incentivized to enter walled garden services that actually do the barest minimum of enforcement for spam activity. I doubt they're conspiring in a dark room somewhere, but neither side is going to upset at the other in that situation.
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>If the government can’t regulate spam then what could it be expected to regulate.
The (US) government does an excellent job of regulating many things, such as commercial airplane design and construction. Oh wait...
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> Almost no-one is pro-spam
They are if you point out ads are just spam by another name
Email is easier to mitigate spam with. The whole body of the message is given upfront.
It's easy now. It was an unsolved problem two decades ago.
And it's not like there's no technical means for the phones either. Just enforcing caller ID would go a long way to curtail spam. Like in our great Red Tape Europe, even with uptick in recent years we have a tiny fraction of spam calls compared to the United States.
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> Email is easier to mitigate spam with
Absolutely disagree, email is the spam king. Just the fact that you can contact someone without consent breaks the entire system.