A Call to Action: Stop the FCC's KYC Regime

Said on a forum that was accessed by IP protocol.

Private Mail Boxes are a godsend. In California this can even be the address on your state ID. You do have to give them your residence address but they consider that private information and only share it with authorized agencies.

Yea pls protect it feels mega oppressive how most EU countries require you to have the SIM card guy in his corner store scan your passport.

> Telco equipment is expensive...

Sure, agreed.

> ...the technology is ridiculously complex...

Odd. I could have sworn that Caller ID, Customer-initiated Dialback, "Tell me the number of my most recent caller", and "Keep calling this number for the next half hour, and ring me if the call is answered" were features that were available on the POTS since the early 1990s. I agree that the tech's complex, but the R&D for the stuff I'm talking about has been over and done with for at least thirty five years. There are adult HN users who have never lived in a world without this stuff.

> ...getting companies especially in less well-off regions to replace aging stuff and updating it to modern standards is next to impossible.

I don't see how that's the problem of "The West"? If it's actually a problem, instruct "Western" telecoms to send a couple-hundred-million dollars in last-gen equipment, along with the techs required to install it and let them declare its original purchase price and the full cost of the manpower as a tax credit.

> ...is nothing short of a miracle.

If we ignore the existence of long-range radio, and if this were prior to 1965 or -at latest- 1970, I might agree. But, like, we've had satellite telecommunications for nearly sixty years, terrestrial microwave transceivers for a couple of decades longer, and short- and long-wave transceivers for far, far longer than either.

Additionally... I don't know if you've noticed, but it's not uncommon to have a satellite phone in your pocket these days.

The simplest phone you can attach to any POTS line in the US is the touch-tone phone. [0] It's a microphone, speaker, ringer, switch, and a DTMF tone generator. The most complicated part of this device by far is the tone generator. The line it's attached to provides the power for all of the electronics/electromechanics inside the phone... and is also responsible for activating the phone's ringer and "knowing" the status of the "on hook" switch. The most basic phone models have no memory or logic inside them of any kind.

Given these restrictions, how does one ensure that one can activate the ringer of a single phone (and connect its speaker and mic to that of the caller, and noone else) in a world where all of the human operators were replaced by electromechanical ones, which were then replaced by fully computerized ones? Once one has figured that out, how does one ensure accurate and correct determination of the calling parties, the transit networks, and the duration of the call? One needs to recover your costs, and one uses usage-based billing to do so. [1]

In order to do those things, mightn't the system that that phone is connected to have to have all of the information about the callers, the systems the call flows through, the duration of the call, etc, etc, etc?

[0] Rotary phones are even simpler than touch-tone phones because they replace the tone generator with an elecromechanical gizmo that bangs on the line when it's rotated. Because I vaguely remember hearing that some phone networks were phasing out support for rotary phones, I'm assuming that you're not guaranteed to be able to attach one and have it function.

[1] I'll only briefly mention POTS features from ~35 years ago such as "Caller ID", "Read to me out loud the phone number of my most recent caller", and "Keep calling this number for the next half hour and ring me if they pick up", which had to (and did) work with these dumb-as-bricks phones.