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What ever happened to SHAKEN/STIR? I thought this was supposed to happen 5 years ago. Did they just chicken out on the prospect of actually shutting down telcos sending spam volume? I still get loads of spam phone calls, so clearly something went wrong (or slow enough to be indistinguishable from wrong).

Medical offices hide their numbers for very good reasons: if you've got an abusive spouse, you often don't want the medical office in your call history. Which results in a lot of very important calls being ignored.

and cut off a million dollar annum laundering scheme to provide such service to the scammer networks? nah... they would never.

This is already not allowed.

If your carrier accepts a spoofed call they're already violating FCC recommendations.

What valid purpose does hidden numbers have? Government departments in my country hide their caller ID.

I find that abusive on its own but let’s not forget about the fact that now you have victims of domestic violence being forced to answer hidden numbers in case it’s welfare, or the cops, or their abusive spouse.

Why do we even need to run on the 20th century system of numbers anyways? Why is there not a better call addressing system?

unfortunately, the grift economy is hyper-meritocratic: If you can figure out a scam and it makes money, who are we, as capitalists, to stop you? You take out the lower rungs of the grift economy, then whose to say who can fleece the tax payer with a repainting of a reflecting pool on tax payer's dime. It's a slippery slope, really.

One thing I wonder is if this is just one step removed from 'Now we know the identity of every user so we can now have both probable cause and verified identity to arrest over statements containing speech we do not like.' "

Like that is Carr's FCC in a nutshell - he wants to control speech by controlling the airwaves. That is a raw fact in his behavior. But when the news stations say the thing they want them to say, what happens next other than slightly extending the definitions of public good to the internet and then restricting speech?

Apple has implemented a mitigation for this in their new modems, but unfortunately its a carrier opt-in, so only actually useful in Europe.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-expands-this-location-focus...

"Downstream collection" would have a field day with this data.

Think of it like a petition or testifying before Congress. The whole point is that you are putting your real name behind it.

And if you think your name and address are private, then I have some bad news for you.

Yes. You need to stand up as a citizen to have the impact (they cross check).

Publication is probably a bit much as a default and chills speech a bit, but it’s also important that the federal register can remain public with all public comment on the web. These are official comments on the record.

call your congress critter instead

My primary phone number has been a Google Voice account since 2010.

It's unclear to me how I'd be impacted by these new rules, but I don't believe there's any requirement to provide PII to get a VOIP number.

I got ATT prepaid in January and still had to give my ID, but it was weirdly not upfront but later on when I was trying to actually activate the service. Not sure what the deal is.

Counterpoint: for my part I would like it to be the case that any phone line that can dial or message my phone can be traced back to a known human being who can be held accountable for abuse of that phone line in terms of generating spam, abuse or harassment.

Seems that we can’t both get what we want.

A potential solution is that you get your anonymous phone line but my phone provider simply refuses to let you call me with it.

Of course then we need to extend the same principle to data and to IP traffic originating from your device. If you don’t want to be traceable it seems reasonable that services should have the right to refuse to handle IP traffic you generate.

Would such a half-baked level of network access suit your needs?

I was nodding in agreement, but I realized there must be some catch here. If this was that simple it probably could've been implemented a while ago.

My guess is that there's some requirement that if it's a working number, it must be able to dial emergency services and that's the loophole that's being exploited. So the FCC's answer is if all numbers must work, push the check directly on the subscriber.

We need to get rid of phones straight up. No one should be able to interrupt someone else by randomly ringing them and demanding attention.

Unless you've had fraud committed against you, that's a hard sell. What dollar figure do you use as the basis? Are you suing for years of credit monitoring? Because that's typically the solution for people who are the victims of PII leaks.

One could argue that it's a failure of law enforcement or telcos or regulators to do enough to prevent fraud and maaaaybe bring a class action or something, but that's a massive stretch.

The government is allowed to create regulations that harm people economically. Not much money to be had by instantly losing that fight.

IMEI is tied to the physical phone, Facetime is Apple-specific, idk what the webrtc option would be. I'm actually glad phone won as digital ID, not cause it's the best choice but because it could've been a lot worse.

Careful, you are one capital letter 'U' away from having the FBI, NSA, SWAT team at your door!

Reading this line in Lopp's article: "FCC even asks whether providers should consult lists of terrorists, terrorist organizations, and “criminal persons” maintained by law enforcement entities," brings to mind McKenzie's work describing the outsourced role of NGO's in vetting banking customers.

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/nonprofit-indicted-ba...

https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/splc-financia...

https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/defendant-cen...

"Effectively giving them the power to decide who can do business." well it's giving the government the power to decide who can do business. The banks and merchants already had that power, but now they have additional legal risk of doing business with whoever the govt doesn't like.

Ever since 2020, I've seen more stores that won't take cash, and refuse to go there on principle even if I was going to pay with card anyway.

> the most blatant attempts at subverting due process

This seems so clear to me; KYC is an end run around the constitution.

But how do we stop it? If we legislate "no KYC" then what is my recourse when an imposter empties my accounts? You'd want it to be at least allowed.

But if we allow industry to require KYC "we will only deposit your pay to a verified bank account" then you may end up with de facto KYC if not de jure. But if you tell businesses they may not require it, it enables other kinds of fraud.

Legislation does not constrain people who will to do evil.

The funny thing is most of the world had already pioneered the airhorn ID long ago. Very few of them saw any decrease in 4 AM airhorn activity, yet some are already well-known to arrest and harass airhorn users to international human rights observers' condemnation.

In theory, it could help. In practice, for KYC to reduce spam and scam calls, FCC would have to be willing to drop hammer big time on people and telcos who allow it to happen. With current political climate in the US, I don't see that happening since companies would scream "Poor pitiful us" and fines would be the cost of doing business.

Italy had forced KYC for all mobile numbers at least since the early 2000's and no, it doesn't fix the spam/scam calls problem at all.

No.

No

You don’t see the harm in requiring telcos - famous for handing over data without warrants or court orders - being forced to have identifying data for every subscriber?

I can think of a half dozen ways that can get abused. Remember that in the states policing is decentralized. There is always some department somewhere willing to abuse their power. Look at how flock has been used to stalk partners, or how geofencing was used to sweep up everyone in the area of a protest, or how stingray is used to listen to all calls in an area. This is opening up avenues of abuse for almost no benefit.

Realistically, it is for 99.9% of people who have phones. The 0.1% have to go out of their way to buy, with cash or crypto, prepaid SIM top-ups on flip phones, and by doing so they stand out like a sore thumb.

Back in the days of rotary phones, not only did the phone providers have your name, they even listed it, your home address, and your phone number in the white pages of the phone book, and everyone in town had a copy of it. Before the rise of microcomputers which enabled data tracking and robocalls, which in turn gave rise to demand for privacy from spam, having that information out in public wasn't a problem except for edge cases like domestic abuse victims or people in a witness protection program. The 99.9%, though, are still getting tracked no matter what, and I sometimes wonder if we've sacrificed the convenience and confidence of the phone-book age for an illusion of privacy that relies on anxiety.

The big ones already force you to give SSN for service. Then they lose it in a data breach.

Almost no one has physical phone lines anymore. It also used to be a given because they had to send a physical paper bill to someone, and hence needed an address.

Neither of these are true anymore.

Also, the tone is set from the top.

Do you think the current admin cares about actually tackling fraud and abuse?

There's a very strong legitimate reason, the right for privacy online.