The telephone, like postal mail, email, http and a myriad of other protocols suffers from a lack of transaction costs. Why is there so much junk postal mail? Because the post office has discounted rates for such mail.
Likewise, back when there were "long distance" tolls (nevermind the 10 cent SMS), there was less telemarketing because it was more expensive to operate call centers in each domain. I'm old enough to remember the sound of a phone ringing as evoking a happy "who could it be?" instead of "what scam is bothering me now?"
Granted, nobody is going to rewrite all the old protocols to bolt on a payment clearinghouse. And legislation is weak against a large pool of relatively minor miscreants since it requires expensive prosecutorial time to enforce, either directly in criminal law or indirectly by regulating major gateways' compliance activities.
To reduce unsolicited commercial contacts, people need to learn to accept expensive communication patterns. Currently we all already pay with the shadow work of curating contact lists, missing important calls because ringer off, deleting and marking as spam junk texts, etc. This shadow work could be reduced by accepting that a communique costs $X, with the knowledge that all the $X spent by others contacting oneself will offset one's own outbound costs.