> 1. Robocalls 2. Robocalls 3. Robocalls 4. Robocalls 5. Robocalls
I have always thought that a simple --and likely very effective-- way to combat robocalls is to charge a nominal fee for all calls not in your address book. That fee could be $1 or more. It really doesn't matter how much other than having to be enough to be costly for those making unwelcome calls.
The charge is levied both ways. If someone you don't know calls you, they pay $1. If you call them back, you pay them $1. The phone company handles this, of course. An alternative is that the charge is registered to their account and credited if you call them back. Being that billing is monthly, the net effect is that no money exchanges hands unless calls are not returned. If you did not respond, the next time the same number calls you the charge is increased by a nominal amount, say, 25%.
Oh, yes, of course, the money goes to you, minus a, say 30% fee to the phone company. This accounting happens at the end of the month, not call-by-call.
If someone wants to make a million unsolicited calls, it's going to cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most of that money will go to the people they are spamming because they will not return the calls. Anyone in your address book is exempt from these transactions.
Without diving deeper, this seems like a simple, clean and perhaps even elegant way to deal with the issue. Let the free market do it. If spammers want to give you hundreds of dollars per month just to make your phone ring, so be it.
Yes, of course, there could be an incentive there for the phone company because, in the aggregate, that 30% might add-up to a nice pile of money. I'm sure there's a creative way to manage that. Perhaps something like a metric based on that income that penalizes them for not doing a better job of filtering the calls. This is where detailed analysis of the proposal is necessary.