Robocall Task Force Says Industry Making Progress

of a March NPRM and notice of inquiry. “Significant progress has been made over the past six months,” the report said. “This is not the end of the industry effort to develop ways to stop unwanted and illegal calls. The industry is committed to continuing to develop mitigation tools and techniques until these illegal harassing calls are stopped.” Lots of focus has been on authentication through what the industry is calling signature-based handling of asserted information using tokens, or SHAKEN, the report said, saying the approach has broad support. “The SHAKEN framework provides a mechanism for managing the deployment of Secure Telephone Identity (STI) technologies with the purpose of providing cryptographic authentication and verification of telephone numbers associated with calls traversing" IP-voice networks, the report said. “This specification defines the framework for telephone service providers to create signatures in Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and validate those signatures at the call termination.” The report said industry consensus is there's no “silver bullet” to end unwanted robocalls. “To mitigate the problem of illegal robocalls, the industry is implementing a diverse multitude of evolving mitigation tools and efforts so that it becomes too costly for illegal robocalling campaigns to overcome the industry’s dynamic mitigation techniques,” the strike force said. “Illegal robocalls not only ruin dinner but they defraud consumers,” Pai said in a statement. “The Strike Force has made significant headway in helping consumers combat illegal robocalls and malicious spoofing. I’m pleased that industry remains committed to carry this work forward. As demonstrated by our recent robocall blocking proposals, we at the FCC are here to help with this work and do whatever we can to combat such calls.” CTIA said the group "and the wireless industry have been working hard and making significant progress in combatting illegal robocalls, while developing tools to give consumers greater control over the calls they receive." The task force “is making progress but most consumers still don’t have access to effective call blocking protection,” said Maureen Mahoney, policy analyst for Consumers Union. “The phone companies should keep working to improve call blocking tools and make sure that all of their customers, including those who rely on traditional landlines, get the protection they deserve. Call-blocking should be a standard feature offered to all phone customers and not a safeguard that consumers have to pay extra to get.”