Robocalls are finally getting blocked

Hello, this is a notice from AT Chinese-- - So you've probablygotten a call like this. These are most of the phonecalls I get at this point. And if someone tries to actually call me, I usually assume it's arobocall and don't pick up. Consumer Reports estimated that Americans received 48 billion robocalls in 2018. There's so many robots in the system that there's no room left for humans. It's a huge problem and ahuge regulatory failure, given how controlled the phone system is. But fixing that problem isa lot harder than it looks. You only understand why, whenyou look at the big picture. (electronic pulsing tones) So there's sort of twoseparate issues here. There's a technological issue that created the problem and a legal issue that kept us from fixing it. But let's start with the tech problem. Of course, no one was gonnabother calling 10,000 people with a rotary phone routed byhuman switchboard operators, just to find one person who would fall for their car insurance scam. Once you get into the 1960s you start to see autodialers which are physical machines that would run throughnumbers automatically, and telemarketers becamea problem pretty quickly. But the closed nature of the phone system made it hard to mount afull scale spam operation. The phone companycontrolled the whole network from the switches to the phone numbers to the wires themselves.


 So if they really wanted to find you. there was nowhere you could hide. The important change for robocallers didn't come from the hardwarebut the network, itself, the actual physical material that was carrying the information. The original phone systemwas built with copper wire, which is fine for voice calls. But when the internet happened suddenly most residential homes were using that same copper todial onto the internet. (dial tones pulsing) It was really slow, andwe only got faster speeds by laying new connectionswith fiber optic cable. That's the modern broadbandnetwork we use today. Once they laid that fiber it was easier just to use fiber for everything, especially since the companiesselling you phone service were often the same companies selling you cable and internet. But that fiber didn't get laid everywhere. So now you've got a strangemash up of copper networks and fiber networks mixing phone traffic and internet traffic with lots of places to jump from one network to the other. The weird overlap of the two networks work like a border town. Anytime spammers got introuble on the phone system, they could switch back tothe internet and disappear. There were IP phone systems that could be hacked,anonymous online call services and dozens of othertricks that robocallers took full advantage of. The basic rule here is that if you're on the internet you get spam. They are just as many spam emails as there are robocalls and they're running a lot of the same scams. But we've gotten pretty goodat dealing with it in email. Those filters aren't perfectbut they mostly work.


So, why can't we do that with robocalls. This is where the legal problem comes in. It turns out there's a specific law that has stopped phone companies from treating robocalls like spam, passed before computers even existed. The Communications Act of 1934 was passed after the government realized that Bell Telephone was gonna be the only phone company in the country, and without some kind of regulation, there was nothing to stop them from jacking up pricesor manipulating service. So a law was written tokeep the company in line. In particular, the CommunicationsAct made it illegal to subject any particular person, class of persons or locality to any undue or unreasonableprejudice or disadvantage. In other words, they had toprovide the same phone service to everyone at a fair price. (drum roll) So, that rule's really important. Without that regulation the phone company could decide that every call to a certain town was gonnacount as long distance or refuse phone service to people if they thought they were gonna use them for something the company didn't like. But carriers also took the rule to mean they had to deliver every call, even the ones that look sketchy. If they got it wrong andblocked a real person, it could look an awful lotlike unreasonable prejudice. That meant that for years, the best you could do to fight robocalls was installing a thirdparty app on your phone.


As long as carriers werestill delivering the call, they didn't mind if anapp blocked it for you. But you still had to dealwith calls as they came in, some of the apps cost money and it was hard to tell thegood ones from the bad ones. This summer the FCC finally stepped in. On June 6, 2019 the Commission voted to affirm robocall blocking by default. Basically promising thatthey wouldn't sue carriers for blocking robocallsbefore they're delivered. Most carriers arealready offering services that will block the calls up front, although the options varyfrom company to company, and sometimes you still have to opt in. Now it's too early to say that we've solved the robocall problem. Carriers are actively blockingcalls now which is great, but it means robocallersare getting more serious about evading the filters, which also means filtershave to get better just to keep pace. It's a whole new arms race andwith the FCC out of the way, it's just getting started. So, if you want a little more information about what you can do to get robocalls off your phone, my friend,Jake, did a step-by-step guide of exactly what youneed to be looking for. Otherwise, thanks for watching!