EPIC, NCLC, Public Knowledge Urge FCC to Help Legal Callers Escape from Illegal Call Traffic

Last week, EPIC, the National Consumer Law Center, and Public Knowledge urged the Federal Communications Commission to reduce the tide of illegal phone calls consumers face by helping legitimate callers understand when their calls are being mixed with illegal traffic. Consumers would benefit because the calls they want to receive (e.g., appointment reminders) would be less likely to be mistakenly labelled or blocked; legal callers would benefit by having more of their calls go through successfully. Some calls that consumers want to receive are mistakenly labeled or blocked due to being transmitted alongside illegal call traffic by unscrupulous voice service providers.

The groups urged the Commission to help legal callers equip themselves with information about which service providers are most likely to be complacent and complicit in transmitting illegal call traffic, so that those legal callers could separate their calls from that problematic traffic by transmitting calls through other voice service providers who are more diligent about blocking bad traffic. This would make the legal callers’ traffic less likely to be mislabeled or wrongly blocked, while applying market pressure on the unscrupulous voice service providers to do a better job at identifying and stopping illegal call traffic.

EPIC routinely participates in regulatory and legislative processes concerning robocalls and files amicus briefs in robocall cases.