Starting right now, small telephone carriers should implement a particular caller ID authentication instrument that may assist determine robocallers, the Federal Communication Commission announced. Known as STIR/SHAKEN, main carriers resembling AT&T and Verizon — because of an FCC rule adopted in 2020 — have had the identical instrument in place since last year. The company initially gave small carriers a extra beneficiant deadline of June 2023 to undertake STIR/SHAKEN, however opted to fast-track adoption as a result of it found “a subset of these small voice service providers were originating an increasing quantity of illegal robocalls.”

But as a brand new report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) notes, merely flagging suspected robocalls will not be sufficient to sort out the robocall trade. “The problem is that applying the STIR/SHAKEN methodology requires only that originating providers apply a certification indicating how confident they are that the caller ID displayed in the calls is correct,” the report states. Presumably, this implies calls can nonetheless be routed by gateway carriers from overseas the place the FCC’s guidelines do not apply. But as EPIC additionally mentions, implementing STIR/SHAKEN might assist determine spam callers, however there are not any actual metrics in place by which to measure how efficient carriers are at stopping the calls. “The FCC’s pending regulatory efforts would continue to require only that providers have procedures in place to mitigate illegal robocalls,” the report factors out, “with no meaningful and enforceable requirement that these procedures actually be effective.”