Robocalls have become a growing nuisance to many of us, with everything from professional voice-overs offering money-making opportunities, to a chopped up recording pretending to be an FBI agent, the calls seem to have increased in the past few months.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has taken notice and held a summit last week (SHAKEN/STIR Robocall Summit) with telecommunications providers to seek the implementation of a system that will address this problem by the end of this calendar year.
The FCC released the following statement from FCC Chairman Ajit Pai:
“We must move aggressively to help consumers combat scam robocalls that use and abuse caller ID spoofing, and that’s why we held today’s summit. The summit was productive, and we received generally encouraging signs that companies are headed toward full implementation of the SHAKEN/STIR caller ID authentication framework. I was pleased to hear from voice service providers, vendors, consumer advocates, and others about the successes to date and the challenges that remain.
“Given what I heard today, I am optimistic that the major voice service providers will meet the end-of-2019 deadline for implementation I set for them. That said, we stand ready to take regulatory action if this deadline is not met. We have already adopted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and will move quickly to mandate SHAKEN/STIR if needed.
“As I’ve said before and as panelists noted today, there is no silver bullet to solving the problem of unwanted robocalls. But caller ID authentication is an important part of the solution. And we will continue to execute on the rest of our multi-pronged strategy as well. We have been and will continue to do everything we can to protect American consumers from this scourge.”
Telecommunications companies have provided responses on their Availability of Free, Default Robocall Blocking Services. You can find your telecommunications provider’s response on the provider list on FCC’s website.
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