This post feels ahistorical, or at least ignorant of developments in the last year.
The volume of robocalls and scam texts I have received on my cellphone has dropped massively over the Biden presidency. I used to get daily text messages for Medicare scams related to a third party's HIPAA leak, daily phone calls for house offers, weekly text messages for car-wrap schemes, and intermittent broadcast phishes and student-loan scams. In the last month, I received four scam calls, three of which were We Buy Houses franchisees, and no scam texts.
But that's just anecdotal evidence; we need true data. Call-filtering software provider Robokiller says that robocalls were down 21% from H2 2022 to H1 2023, though spam texts were up. I haven't yet found a comprehensive database.
Are those changes the result of actions taken by the Feds under the Biden administration? I think so.
Congress passed the TRACED Act in 2019, laying the groundwork for what follows...
FCC issued rules in 2020 mandating STIR/SHAKEN adoption, which makes Caller ID reliable and, and required NANP telcos to block telcos that don't implement STIR/SHAKEN.
Those blocking requirements went into effect in 2021, but they had loopholes.
FCC effectively killed car warranty phone calls by 2022.
FCC issued its first rules requiring telecoms to block scam texts in March 2023.
FCC in June 2023 won convictions of two robocallers, whose calls targeted Black voters with vaccine scaremongering in an effort to convince them to not vote. In a separate docket, the scammers are being charged with elections-related crimes.
FCC issued rules limiting spammy VoIP providers' access to NANP phone numbers in September 2023.
Biden got a third Democrat commissioner appointed to the FCC in October 2023. The new commissioner wasn't Gigi Sohn, but a 3-2 partisan tilt means that the FCC can actually pass the regulations that Republicans opposed on partisan grounds.
FCC petitioned Congress in October 2023 for the authority to actually collect the fines it issues to violators.
FTC (not the FCC) began prosecuting robocallers in July 2023.
FCC issued a rule blocking the "lead generation" loophole in December 2023, whereby a company would collect consent to send automated messages to you on behalf of a third party, then sell that consent to additional third parties. The FCC is also proposing to make email-to-text services opt-in instead of opt-out, which will close a common spam technique, and to apply a mechanism like STIR/SHAKEN to text messages, which will make it harder to send spam texts without getting caught.
The biggest item on the shopping list would be banning automated phone calls to landlines, making landlines have parity with cellphones, but that'll require an act of Congress, which will require Dems to win the House in 2024 and hold the Senate and Presidency.
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