AT&T CEO Says He Can't Deploy Robocall Blockers Without FCC Approval. He's Wrong (2016)

Posted by dredmorbius 1 day ago

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Comment by dredmorbius 1 day ago

There's are reasons AT&T are on my permablacklist, and this article (along with a slew of others at the Dallas Morning News) is several of them. AT&T, and other major telcos, are fatally conflicted over telephone solicitations, in all their forms: unsolicited phone calls, robocalls, spam, and scams. They've dragged their feet for decades whilst their subscribers lose billions of dollars to at best useless and unecessary goods and services, and at worst, fraud and scams.

Dave Lieber of DMN ran a series of articles on this as well, I recommend:

"Watchdog Memo to AT&T's CEO: Didn't mean to get you in trouble" <https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2016/07/08/watchdog...>

And:

"Watchdog: AT&T's CEO gets new job, Frontier employees dance during disaster" <https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2016/08/04/watchdog...>

At Techdirt: "AT&T Falsely Blames The FCC For Company's Failure To Block Annoying Robocalls " <https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/02/att-falsely-blames-fcc-c...>

The FCC announcement, voted on June 18, 2015: "Fact Sheet: Wheeler Proposal to Protect and Empower Consumers Against Unwanted Robocalls, Texts to Wireless Phones" <https://web.archive.org/web/20150910081851/https://apps.fcc....> (PDF)

Comment by anon7000 1 day ago

It’s an abject market failure that no carrier out there has solved this problem. I have whatever Verizon provides, and it’s basically useless.

I would switch to a provider that solved this solution, but none do. Clearly they’re making more money offering a bad experience to the consumer.

Comment by dredmorbius 1 day ago

Comcast/Xfinity, of all companies, actually has a reasonably good, network-based capability, "Spam Blocker": <https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/spam-blocker-overvi...>

I discussed it yesterday in another thread:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49126133>

I suspect that the relevant factor is that Comcast doesn't provide significant outbound business telephony relative to its household business, though that is one of their business offerings, see: <https://business.comcast.com/>.

(I may be entirely wrong on this, I'm just learning much of this in the past few days/weeks.)

Comment by bediger4000 1 day ago

My theory has been that scammers have two things: (1) "pink contracts" with phone companies, the scammers pay extra money so that telcos won't throw them overboard and (2) scammers have bribed US lawmakers to keep the situation paralyzed.

I really hope that the money the 10 or 20 people who are in on this got is worth the price of ruining a global utility communication system.

Comment by FireBeyond 1 day ago

No doubt. Before they went bust (and this is aging myself), I worked for a web design company - we had a guy who brought us a bunch of business, and never met a get-rich-quick scheme too problematic. He had the "bright idea" of what was basically pyramid scheme spam - people got paid to import their address book or manually add all their friends and so on. We did not work on this project. He regaled us with the woes of finding hosting, as no-one wanted to touch it as soon as they translated his bullshit trying to legitimize it - except GlobalCrossing, who was happy to host it for a "surcharge" atop their usual rates.

Comment by smalltorch 1 day ago

Anecdotal, but when I switched carriers to ATT, I immediately started getting loads of spam calls. Same number. So it made me think ATT had a leak somewhere in there infra.

Comment by rawgabbit 1 day ago

My elderly parents don’t answer the phone anymore due to all the scams. Hospital and medical offices calls all go to voicemail. They do answer FaceTime. Even with this protocol they still struggle because iOS added focus time and it keeps nagging about turning it on. Soon we will lockdown their phones with Assistive Access mode. TLDR scams and hostile UX have made mobile phones unusable.

Comment by butvacuum 1 day ago

I turned focus time off- and have'nt heard from it in so long I had to look up what you were talking about.

Comment by lostlogin 1 day ago

> TLDR scams and hostile UX have made mobile phones unusable.

I’m guess that I’m in too much of a backwater, but here in New Zealand I couldn’t tell you the last time I got a spam call and have probably had <5 ever.

I’ve had a few spam sms messages, but these are also rare.

Comment by dredmorbius 1 day ago

New Zealand is amongst the countries which fare pretty well, averaging about 1 spam call/month. Rates vary considerably worldwide, Brazil peaks at 29. And within countries rates vary considerably by individual, with some people reporting virtually no calls, others many per day. As with much else in technology and mass communications, individual experience vary hugely.

See my earlier comment: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131195>.

Citing "Robocalls: A Worldwide or US-only Problem? Analyzing Spam and Fraud in International Phone Calls" (30 Jun 2026) <https://arxiv.org/html/2606.31790> and a Hiya report <https://work.hiya.com/hubfs/2025/Global%20Call%20Threat%20Re...> (PDF).

Comment by lostlogin 23 hours ago

Thanks for this.

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