Earlier quoted context omitted.
The phone system seems pretty absurd. Just the fact that we can't trust originating phone numbers seems odd. There's lots of good ideas to go around, and there's so much in internet technology that could be applied to the phone system, but I'd love to read an article on why its hard to update the phone system.
There are many reasons: -You forward your office phone to your cell phone. You want the number of the original person calling to show up on your cell phone. This means that the office phone system needs to spoof the original caller's phone number. This could be a local call, an overseas call, etc. This is not a simple update issue. How does the telco know that this is a legitimate spoof? Further, if this is blocked a…
But of course, then twilio is only doing this to keep scammers off their own platform. Since the telcos don't validate anything, there are plenty of less scrupulous providers that don't validate anything.
So all the telcos need to do is require anyone providing access to their networks to validate their caller ID numbers.