Telnyx CEO: FCC-Proposed Fine Appears to Be a Dead Issue

In an interview with Communications Daily, Casem discussed how the NAL is changing Telnyx's approach to telecommunications policy, as well as what needs to be done to better tackle the enduring problem of illegal robocalls and robotexts. The following transcript was edited for length and clarity.

Casem: We haven't heard from the FCC in several months. And I think if you look at NALs historically, there usually is a notice of proposed forfeiture that comes shortly thereafter. We haven't heard anything, so I would be very surprised if the FCC were to take further action on that NAL.

I'm not sure that the FCC is going to come out and publicly rescind it. Nevertheless, we certainly learned a lot from it. We've now changed our posture. We have come to realize that it's important to have a voice and make sure that we're out there advocating for policy that's going to strengthen innovation rather than stifle it. We were active in [FCC] working groups [like the North American Numbering Council]. I think ultimately, we're pretty disappointed with what came of those efforts. So while we continue to participate in groups like the Cloud Communications Alliance and other industry groups that advocate on behalf of competitive carriers and VoIP companies, I think our sights are now set on addressing some of these issues with Congress and the White House. Our hope is that that sort of advocacy will ultimately prove to be more effective.

CD: What steps ultimately still need to be taken, either by the FCC or Congress, to make a real substantive dent in illegal robocalls and robotexts?

Casem: It's obviously twofold, right? It's solve for end-to-end IP interconnection. And once we have that, we're going to be able to substantially collect data in an unbiased way. Tracebacks ... suggest that the issue is not coming from the mobile networks themselves. The second thing ... is bolstering law enforcement efforts to go after these folks, right? The scams, the real serious stuff, based on what we've seen from people trying to exploit our network, it's not some dispersed group. It's not like "here's a million scammers in the United States, and they're all just super sophisticated." It's these small, concentrated groups of people that are constantly looking for ways to be able to facilitate a particular scam. When it becomes too hard to try to abuse our platform to do it, they move on to the next one. We think it became easy for folks to want to do this stuff because [the enforcement response is] just so disjointed. We would advocate for something like an information-sharing program, a la what Australia's Scamwatch has, which now has a demonstrated ability to reduce scams in Australia.

And so I think if law enforcement were tuned in, and it was made a priority for them, a lot of this stuff would also go away.

CD: What should be done with Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence (Traced) Act implementation to make that legislation more effective?

Casem: I think the FCC has been running victory laps now for several years, talking about mission accomplished with respect to [the Traced Act], when nothing could be further from the truth. At Telnyx, we sign 100% of the calls that leave our network. And a cursory review of how many of those signatures make it across to the other side, it's less than 30%. That's obviously problematic. Rather than getting at the crux of the issue … the industry has continued to propose solutions. These solutions, mind you, [often] give the big carriers a free pass.

The fact that we're still in a place where a lot of calls somehow make it onto the circuit switch side rather than going into an IP is a problem. We need to … stop going down this path of "let's solve the problem through blocking" because it has a ton of negative externalities. Lots of folks who should be receiving phone calls are not receiving [them]. The scammers, by the way, are the ones that are clever enough and resourceful enough to figure out how to make their calls go through, ultimately. And so it's disproportionately affecting small businesses and folks that sort of rely on the telephone network to just work. The FCC gave large operators such blanket coverage to block calls -- [that] is super dangerous and created this entire cottage industry of caller ID reputation service or branded caller ID service. I think people don't recognize what the implication of sort of going down that path is -- the cost of the phone call is going to go up easily by an order of magnitude. A call costs today a fraction of a penny per minute, a fraction of a fraction. Now, if you're going to require people to pay 5 cents or 2 cents, or whatever the number may be, it’s sort of this monetization of mistrust.