> What I don’t understand is how providers haven’t a clue which providers are even sending the calls.
This is how it works. The scammers are using $SCUMMY_VOIP_PROVIDER, which is a service that's pretty much marketing to illegal robocallers and making money off of it. The recipient phone companies only know that the calls are coming from $SCUMMY_VOIP_PROVIDER, and are unable to do anything about it because... they don't want to. They're not suffering from it, it costs money to build the systems to work out exactly how scummy $SCUMMY_VOIP_PROVIDER is, and trying to refuse calls from $SCUMMY_VOIP_PROVIDER might land them in legal hot water (which would cost them money even if they won).
There is a very effective solution, reputation, which is how spam mail exited the picture (from most users' perspective). Essentially, you rate your counterparty provider based on what fraction of their userbase is spam and make life worse for them the higher it is. The big email providers worked out the technical solution largely because spam is actually rather expensive to deal with (storing all spam email would increase your capacity requirements by ~10×), and the solution of screwing spammers over incrementally is easy to implement (effectively, you can throttle email since retry is builtin).
This is why my personal preference is to make the telcos more liable. If you get a spam call, I think that your telco should pay up under the TCPA if they can’t collect from the next company in the chain, etc. All these companies will shape up very quickly.
I could barely care a rats ass for telcos. I want internet provider I can trust. I have very little use for a voice phone provider except for authentication.
If I could transfer my main number to something that only accepted sms and voicemail I would immediately and move my iCloud account to an email address.
I don’t believe in at&t, Verizon it any of them. Something better is coming.
ATT and Verizon (and T-Mobile and Sprint) own all the mobile communications infrastructure. ATT and Verizon own a lot of the wired communications infrastructure. They are not going anywhere.
This is how it works. The scammers are using $SCUMMY_VOIP_PROVIDER, which is a service that's pretty much marketing to illegal robocallers and making money off of it. The recipient phone companies only know that the calls are coming from $SCUMMY_VOIP_PROVIDER, and are unable to do anything about it because... they don't want to. They're not suffering from it, it costs money to build the systems to work out exactly how scummy $SCUMMY_VOIP_PROVIDER is, and trying to refuse calls from $SCUMMY_VOIP_PROVIDER might land them in legal hot water (which would cost them money even if they won).
There is a very effective solution, reputation, which is how spam mail exited the picture (from most users' perspective). Essentially, you rate your counterparty provider based on what fraction of their userbase is spam and make life worse for them the higher it is. The big email providers worked out the technical solution largely because spam is actually rather expensive to deal with (storing all spam email would increase your capacity requirements by ~10×), and the solution of screwing spammers over incrementally is easy to implement (effectively, you can throttle email since retry is builtin).