The solution will involve serious privacy implications. Because an intelligent solution would be outright rejected. e.g. Limit on number of calls you can make, perhaps? Nobody needs to make a call every 10~15 seconds for prolonged periods.
-Renegade
Except for perhaps, at home or office collection agencies, political advertisers, pollsters, real estate agents, tax-exempt marketers (Red Cross, ACS, ADA, etc etc etc). As much as I'd like to see even these stopped, under the law they can still market legally and aren't affected by the DNC registry.....
-Tinman57
Depends. No *HUMAN* needs to make calls that often. Any desk where a human is has no real need to make calls every 10 seconds. Except for marketers... Whatever they are peddling is pretty much irrelevant - they're still trying to hock something off on you. Whether it's "please help the *children*" or "please buy my vacuum".
The solution is very simple - throttle call volumes. Make it impractical to run a call center (that calls out).
And quite honestly, if some advertising call center goes broke, who cares? They hire people for a pittance anyways, so they're not providing decent employment in any event.
ISPs already do this exact same thing.
"Get UNLIMITED high-speed downloads for only $59.95 per month!" = Once you've used up 100 GB of traffic (up or down), we drop you from 2 Mbps to 160 kbps.
Spam is spam. Whether it's in your physical mailbox, email inbox, or on your phone. They're spammers.
UCE - Unsolicited Commercial Email --> Unsolicited Commercial Phone Calls -- Is there any significant difference? I don't think so.
As for the Red Cross, or political parties or collection agencies... What makes what they're doing different from what spammers do? I really don't see any difference at all.
They all boil down to one thing - they want your money or they want *something* from you.
Throttle. Make it impractical to run a business based on spam.
It won't completely solve the problem, but it would certainly make a large dent in the problem. (I do not believe that the problem can ever be "solved", but only "tamed" somewhat.)
I do have a very nasty solution though... Diabolical if I might say...
Diabolical solution
For all phone calls, intercept the call and play a message that states that the call they are making is subject to "terms and conditions" (or an "agreement") and that those terms and conditions can be read at some URL that's rather long, complicated, and annoying. e.g.
http://92634sfdneith...cgnvdsghe=4o8fhneifeForce the caller to choose to accept the terms to make their call, or simply hang up if they don't.
If they accept, forward the call on as normal.
In the terms and conditions, utterly and completely rape the caller as hard as possible. Charge the b'jeez out of them with the maximum legal interest rate calculated and compounded by the yoctosecond (10^-24). Record everything. In the terms/agreement, make them surrender all rights to arbitration, or any rights at all - get draconian, brutal, imaginative is a seriously evil way, etc. etc. etc. Make them your slave for eternity. i.e. Pretend that you're a lawyer/politician/bankster.
