France to Ban Unsolicited Telemarketing Calls from August 11

This is a great move by France, but most of the rest of the world does not suffer from the telemarketing scam hell that Americans do.

I am a US citizen living overseas. I have a US cell number that is only used for 2FA for US financial institutions. No one else has that number. I get more scam calls every day on that number than I do in a year on my local number. It's crazy.

Most of the world has solved the worst of the problem by simply not allowing caller-ID spoofing and by blocking bad actors the way that ISPs block email coming from known bad IPs.

The US already has the STIR/SHAKEN authentication protocols, but the telcos seem to feel no financial or regulatory pressure to clamp down on all the sketchy intermediate carriers the scammers use to bypass them.

Maybe it's America's love of "market-based solutions" that prevents of from solving this problem the way everyone else has?

Rather then actually solve the problem via regulation, the US prefers to turn it into business opportunities to make the situation suck slightly less by letting the telcos sell subscriptions to moderately effective blocking programs and an creating an ecosystem of moderately effective apps.

As long as message broadcasting remains cheap (in any form; phone, email, text, etc) it will go on. All modern media has evolved technically (and financially) to benefit the producer (the talker). All at the expense of the consumer (listener). Make outgoing bandwidth cost per instance and you’ll see a reduction/optimization of the production. When signal is free to produce, you end up with a lot of noise.

My pet peeve is that a full class A attestation is still not a requirement in 2026. The US FCC won't do it. I have no hope from the current administration. However, perhaps France is in a unique position to implement this. The idea is that all calls that have a domestic caller ID will be required to have full class A attestation and all carriers will be required by law to block any calls that do not have such full attestation. Any carrier that attests phone numbers that it is not supposed to should get huge fines and criminal charges. This is my dream for what all Telecoms in the world should do, hopefully beginning with France. This requires broad support within the country and a firm deadline so companies don't shrug it off until the last moment and then demand an extension.

> On the other hand, France's new law has raised concerns in Morocco, where Employment Minister Younes Sekkouri, said in March that between 40,000 and 50,000 jobs were at risk in the country’s call centers. Sekkouri said the French market accounts for more than 80% of revenue in the sector.

Never build a business around hassling other people. It's always at risk that laws will suddenly change and destroy your livelihood; because good leadership will realize that the best approach to handling you is to exclude you from the negotiating table and abruptly cut you off.

This might come as a surprise to some people, but no one likes having their phone turned into a device that makes them listen to a commercial at random times throughout the day.

The correct solution is just giving people the option to charge people for phoning them.

Say minimum wage is 12euro/hour, and declining a call takes about a minute of your attention, so this is worth at least 20cent.

Instead of just "Answer" and "Hang-Up", there should be a gov't enforced "charge caller 20cent" option.

This would have no impact on 'real' calls, nobody would charge their Mother and if someone is tacky enough to charge their GP or mechanic they could just be billed for it, and it would hardly be worth someone's trouble to try to steal a phone to call themselves to collect 20c, but it would totally ruin the economics of these spam calls.

The same should exist for emails.

Norway has the same law. I get no spam calls like this from Norway.

What I do get is spam calls from abroad. Often with a spoofed Norwegian number. Why can't operators block this? I know call centers and various things need to "spoof" a number they own, and when I myself call from abroad my Norwegian number will come from outside Norway.

But why can't they attest the numbers somehow? Owner of +47 XXXXXXX is currently not abroad. So why allow someone from the other side of the world to call me pretending to come from that number? Why does the Norwegian operators allow that?

A perspective as I live in France:

- There was already an easy statewide system to opt-out of telemarketing calls

- Having always been on that system, I still got many scam calls that sound like telemarketing

So it's great to have a ban rather than an opt-out, but this will not solve the issue of scam calls

Essentially useless. My country also banned them and has a "do not call" registry, doesn't stop scammers from calling my phone non-stop.

Also legally speaking all you need is "Check this box if you don't want spam" and the floodgates are open, legally.

You need telco-level detection and blocking. If a cellphone number makes 1000 calls today maybe it's not a real cellphone, is it. Block the calls.

The previous system never blocked scams because scammers didn't bother to check if your phone number was in the block-list before calling you.

That new law is not going to change the number of spam calls most people will get, as they're not from properly registered businesses.