Robocall Rules Won't Work Against Illegal Robotexts: CTIA Lawyer

The FCC can’t take the same approach on robotexts as it does on robocalls, said Wilkinson Barker’s Matt Gerst, representing CTIA, during an FCBA webinar Wednesday. Other industry speakers said the FCC’s attack on robocalls since 2017 appears to be paying dividends, though work remains.

CTIA supports “common sense rules” from the FCC, like new requirements that carriers block messages that are “highly likely to be illegal” because they come from invalid, unallocated or unused phone numbers, Gerst said. Today, providers are vetting high-volume message centers before they send messages, and they block messages that don’t originate with valid identifiers, he said.

“Vetting and blocking is a big reason that there isn’t a rampant number of spoofing problems in the messaging ecosystem,” Gerst said. The FCC’s Consumer Advisory Committee found last year the problem is impersonation scams, not number spoofing (see 2208310058), he said. Those scams “require different resources, different tools,” he said.

Gerst said “it’s pretty clear” that Stir/Shaken, which has worked well with robocalls, won’t be effective against robotexts. “There might be technological solutions that help to mitigate spam messages that are out there, and CTIA is supportive of those,” he said.

The FCC also proposed in a March robotext Further NPRM (see 2303160061) a block-upon-notice requirement, also drawn from the push against robocalls, Gerst said: “Here too the record made clear that the FCC doesn’t need to direct providers to block illegal messages. … They’re blocking billions of them each year.” There’s more the FCC can do, like closing loopholes in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, putting more pressure on bad actors and encouraging information sharing, he said. “At the end of the day, keeping … consumer trust in messaging has got to be everybody’s priority,” he said.

“We all know why we’re here -- it’s because we were getting too many robocalls,” said Josh Bercu, USTelecom vice president-policy and advocacy. The FCC has already handed down multiple robocall orders, with others still open, he said. “This is one of the issues that everyone agrees,” he said: “We hate how illegal robocalls have taken over the phone networks. No one wants them. It’s bipartisan.”

Robocalls became a problem because it’s cheap and easy to make calls to and from anywhere, Bercu said. “You can call your friends and family all over the world for nothing now … where it used to be extremely expensive,” he said. “It’s also cheap and easy for the bad guys to make calls,” he said.

VoIP calls and texts "are different,” said Rebekah Johnson, CEO of consulting firm Numeracle. On robocalls the FCC is playing the role of everyone’s mother, Johnson said. “She’s just trying to tell her children what to do, but it’s not mom’s responsibility for how you get through life,” she said. There’s a lot more industry can do “that doesn’t have to be mandated,” she said.

Over time, the FCC has imposed different requirements on different segments of the industry, said Brian Hurley, ACA Connects chief regulatory counsel. In the most recent orders, “the FCC has extended requirements for one segment to other segments throughout the ecosystem to fill in perceived gaps or to kind of create more consistency … in terms of what the requirements are,” he said.

Implementation of the FCC’s know-your-upstream-provider requirement has been a “non-event” for most Incompas members, “so long as your providers all along have been putting together commercial arrangements and agreements with a lot of the providers that they’re affiliated with,” said Christopher Shipley, executive director-public policy. Incompas welcomed creation of “standardized frameworks around Stir/Shaken, call blocking, labeling, that will ensure that there’s no discriminatory behavior and competitively neutral behavior,” Shipley said.

There was initially “a lot of angst” among NTCA members about a recent requirement that providers file mitigation plans in the robocall mitigation database (see 2303170056), said Brian Ford, NTCA vice president-federal regulatory. The directive was “this better not be something that you just file and stick in the drawer -- this needs to be a road map for how you operate your company on a day-to-day basis,” he said. Members have done a good job of addressing that requirement, he said.

“Whether it’s calls or text messages, the industry is focused on one thing and that’s consumer trust,” Gerst said. Wireless providers were the first to implement Stir/Shaken, participate in the USTelecom’s Industry Traceback Group, “and to use innovative tools and analytics to block illegal calls,” he said. “The results have been positive,” he said: “We’ve seen some reductions in egregious robocalls, but we have more work to do to restore trust from consumers in voice,” he said.