FCC Finally Gets Around To Cracking Down On Annoying Robotexts

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the take-your-time dept

After an inexplicable year-plus delay, the FCC is finally circulating a new order that should help dramatically reduce the number of illegal, annoying, and scam robotexts received by wireless subscribers.

The FCC order, which was introduced more than a year ago, was only finally voted on and approved this week. The order begins the process of making rules that would require that wireless providers block robotexts from numbers that have already been determined to be sources of likely scams and spam:

“The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking released today proposes and seeks comment on applying caller ID authentication standards to text messaging. It proposes requiring mobile wireless providers to block texts, at the network level, that purport to be from invalid, unallocated, or unused numbers, and numbers on a Do-Not-Originate (DNO) list.

It’s not clear why it has taken the FCC so long to even begin the process of new rule creation, though Ars Technica implies that Trump-appointed FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington may have lagged on approval for some reason. The approval occurred only after Axios reporters pressed the FCC on why such a basic decision was seemingly taking so long.

(Recall that the FCC lacks a 3-2 Democratic voting majority thanks to an ugly smear campaign being waged against Biden nominee Gigi Sohn by the telecom sector, which has made getting anything even remotely “controversial” approved at the agency intentionally difficult).

We’ve noted repeatedly how the federal government’s failure to police robocalls and robotexts isn’t really a technical issue at this point. It’s more a corruption problem.

The FCC has historically had its authority hamstrung on the issue thanks to relentless lobbying by the marketing industry and legitimate companies that often implement all the same tactics as scammers. These companies not only routinely get to dictate rule loopholes, they’ve been rewarded with a series of court rulings making it harder for the FCC to do its job (when it can be bothered to get around to it).

Congress is also hesitant to push too hard, as politicians don’t want to lose their ability to spam you themselves. Congress did pass the TRACED Act in 2019, urging the FCC to consider new rules reining in scam texts, but consumer groups say it failed to expand the FCC authority in any way that would meaningfully help it police the problem. And it failed to do so, as usual, because industry doesn’t much like U.S. consumer protection regulators with any real teeth (see: net neutrality, broadband privacy, etc.)

The FCC issued a July consumer alert warning about the rise in unwanted robotexts, the agency’s latest NPRM noting that it has seen 14,000 consumer complaints about robotexts so far this year, a 146 percent increase.

Again, it’s foundationally ridiculous that we’ve let a key communications platform get hijacked by scumbags, criminals, scammers, and debt collectors, and that it’s taken this long to even embrace baseline efforts to do the bare minimum about it. While a lot of blame gets tossed around, like most seemingly intractable U.S. problems, the core cause can often be tracked back to greed and corruption.

Filed Under: auto warranty scams, consumer protection, fcc, robotexts, scam calls, telecom