Starks Disappointed by Call-Blocking Responses from Providers
FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said he’s disappointed about responses to his June letter (see 1906100025) to 14 providers seeking details on their plans to offer free, default call blocking services to consumers aimed at curbing robocalls. Some were posted Thursday,…
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as the FCC held a robocall summit (see 1907110023). “Despite historically clamoring for new tools, it does not appear that all providers have acted with haste to deploy opt-out robocall blocking Services,” Starks said Friday: “The Commission spoke clearly: we expect opt-out call blocking services to be offered to consumers for free. Reviewing the substance of these responses, by and large, carriers’ plans for these services are far from clear.” Among the new responses, T-Mobile said it has long been helping customers fight scam calls. “T-Mobile’s scam-fighting tools are updated every six minutes through machine learning and artificial intelligence that looks at the behavior of a call -- a capability not available through applications,” the carrier said: “T-Mobile was the first to adopt this network-based approach specifically because network solutions provide real-time decisions on incoming calls, intelligent analysis of phone call and network-wide data, and an adaptable machine-learning based framework to stop the next scammer tactic.” Verizon said “components needed to provide consumers with meaningful protections from robocalls … exist today.” Frontier is evaluating “whether we can feasibly offer default call blocking services on an informed opt-out basis.”