Americans exhausted by congressional gridlock may get a gift this holiday season, after all: a bipartisan law cracking down at long last on the universal nuisance of incessant robocalls.
Good, old-fashioned legislating has led lawmakers from competing proposals in the two chambers this spring to a consolidated proposal that looks likely to land on the presidents desk this week a somewhat nostalgic reminder of what government can do when its working. This year saw 54.6 billion spam calls placed, but next year could turn out to be a lot quieter.
A technological reality is responsible for the robocall epidemic: It costs less than a penny to bug someone with a garbage call, and its also possible to spend thousands of those cents with minimal effort or time. This problem is compounded by the ability to spoof numbers, which lets fraudsters scam senior citizens by pretending to be the Internal Revenue Service and also hide from any authorities who try to track them down.
The Traced Act would attack the spoofing scourge directly. The bill would require service providers to adopt a cutting-edge authentication system that can root out the fakery the product of commendable work from a consortium of engineers in the telecommunications industry. Better yet, it would order providers to adopt that technology free of charge to consumers, and it would move toward making automatic blocking easier. These tasks are trickier in rural areas that still run on copper wiring, so theres a special provision intended to assist carriers with the burden.
The one place where the legislation falls short involves whats left over: the telemarketers who take advantage of tools that allow them to harass en masse but who use their real numbers and real identities. A provision in the original House proposal would have addressed the problem by instructing the Federal Communications Commission on how to end a ping-pong match between courts over the definition of an auto-dialer. The rule, controversial among Republicans, ended up a casualty of compromise.
Congresss bill isnt perfect. But its certainly good and far, far better than the nothing Americans have gotten on the robocall problem until today. The proposal would deserve swift passage as a standalone bill or, as lawmakers plan, packaged with an also-worthy broadband mapping bill and a measure to secure the 5G supply chain from national security threats. That way Americans can ring in 2020 with a lot less unwanted ringing from the other end of the line.
