(phone ringing)
- [Woman Robocaller] Hello, this is a notice
from AT&T Chinese--
- So you've probably gotten a call like this.
These are most of the phone calls I get at this point.
And if someone tries to actually call me,
I usually assume it's a robocall 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 a huge regulatory failure,
given how controlled the phone system is.
But fixing that problem is a lot harder than it looks.
You only understand why, when you look at the big picture.
(electronic pulsing tones)
So there's sort of two separate 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 gonna bother calling 10,000 people
with a rotary phone routed by human 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 through numbers automatically,
and telemarketers became a problem pretty quickly.
But the closed nature of the phone system
made it hard to mount a full scale spam operation.
The phone company controlled 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 hardware but the network, itself,
the actual physical material
that was carrying the information.
The original phone system was built with copper wire,
which is fine for voice calls.
But when the internet happened
suddenly most residential homes were using
that same copper to dial onto the internet.
(dial tones pulsing)
It was really slow, and we only got faster speeds
by laying new connections with fiber optic cable.
That's the modern broadband network we use today.
Once they laid that fiber it was easier
just to use fiber for everything,
especially since the companies selling 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 strange mash 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 in trouble on the phone system,
they could switch back to the internet and disappear.
There were IP phone systems
that could be hacked, anonymous online call services
and dozens of other tricks 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 good at dealing with it in email.
Those filters aren't perfect but 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 prices or manipulating service.
So a law was written to keep the company in line.
In particular, the Communications Act made it illegal
to subject any particular person,
class of persons or locality
to any undue or unreasonable prejudice or disadvantage.
In other words, they had to provide 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 gonna count 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 and blocked a real person,
it could look an awful lot like unreasonable prejudice.
That meant that for years,
the best you could do to fight robocalls
was installing a third party app on your phone.
As long as carriers were still delivering the call,
they didn't mind if an app blocked it for you.
But you still had to deal with calls as they came in,
some of the apps cost money
and it was hard to tell the good 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 that they wouldn't sue carriers
for blocking robocalls before they're delivered.
Most carriers are already offering services
that will block the calls up front,
although the options vary from 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 blocking calls now which is great,
but it means robocallers are getting more serious
about evading the filters,
which also means filters have to get better
just to keep pace.
It's a whole new arms race and with 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 you need to be looking for.
Otherwise, thanks for watching!