Comment by darby_nine
2 years ago
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.
Hence my other example of the inability to police prisons enough to prevent abuse, I didn't allege an explicit scheming but a happy little accident. Allowing a problem to fester when it benefits you is totally normal and expected behavior. But if there is a role for government at all it would be regulate such dysfunctions.
> In fact there are really only two groups that are pro-spam
you forgot the entire marketing industry
> everyone is incentivized to enter walled garden services that actually do the barest minimum of enforcement for spam activity
These walled gardens actively spam you—that's how they make money. They only act against competing advertisers.
For there to be an incentive to avoid spam, we would need a social network not funded by it. To my knowledge this is essentially ActivityPub. In order for ActivityPub to be useful, we need an incentive to drag celebrities away from private paychecks that benefit from manipulation of other social networks (twitter, ig, tt). I don't believe there is any such entity or incentivization right now.
Not quite. For example politicians benefit from being able to solicit donations over mass text.
>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...
> The (US) government does an excellent job of regulating many things, such as commercial airplane design and construction
If the US government wanted a healthy industry, they would have bought one or otherwise directed actual competition. Instead we only have Boeing, which taxpayers also subsidized, which seems incompetent and unwilling to acknowledge fault, which seems to be generally a gargantuan waste of taxpayer dollars compared to a properly efficient and reliable no-profit outfit.
I don't understand what this has to do with spam.
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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.
> It's easy now.
If this were true we wouldn't have spam
> 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.
A) this is insanely naïve given the international treaties that make up telecommunication agreements. B) "Just enforcing caller ID would go a long way to curtail spam." telecoms don't have any clue who is calling, see above comments about treaties.
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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.