Re: [sipcore] RESPONSE REQUESTED: SIPCORE work and milestones

[Henning Schulzrinne <[e-mail]>]

A bit of background below.

The two drafts are part of a broader suite of tools, and probably among the lower-importance ones compared to, in particular, the STIR caller ID authentication work. I think there is some consensus that a complete robocall prevention eco system consists of a number of components:

(1) A way to validate caller ID, to prevent spoofing and to facilitate tracking and suitable law enforcement. (Spoofing makes the other parts hard or fail.) Law enforcement, besides putting a few spammers behind bars, changes the risk/reward calculus and thus discourages copy cats.

(2) With authenticated caller ID, various block/black lists can work, decreasing the reach of spammers and thus again weakening their business model.

(3) Given the challenges of not being able to do content analysis easily (or look at the history of domain names or senders), human feedback is important to populate the blacklists. Also, as for email, there's a significant gray zone of calls in between the clearly-wanted (calls from your spouse, one would hope) and the outright-criminal fraud. The "unwanted" draft allows for standards-based feedback by humans to make both automated blocking, for groups of customers and the individual, and enforcement work better.

(4) Given the gray area and the general desire not to interfere with communications, for both customer-focused and, in some countries, legal reasons, some calls are best flagged and labeled rather than rejected, so that end systems or humans can make more nuanced decisions. Examples often cited include calls from charities, politicians and survey organizations, but also automated calls for prescription pickup, school snow days or outstanding debts. The 'callinfo' draft addresses this particular need.

Both drafts are outgrowths of the Robocall Strike Force (https://www.fcc.gov/news-events/events/2016/10/second-meeting-industry-led-robocall-strike-force) and were identified as standards gaps by the participants.

Thus, the drafts are unlikely, by themselves, to solve the robocall problem, but hopefully they'll help in a small way.

Henning

-----Original Message-----
From: sipcore [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of Dale R. Worley
Subject: Re: [sipcore] RESPONSE REQUESTED: SIPCORE work and milestones

>  3. A mechanism for labeling the nature of SIP calls, with
>     <draft-schulzrinne-sipcore-callinfo-spam> as a likely candidate draft.

Certainly spam calls are a problem in reality.  Do people consider this a way to help suppress them in practice?

Dale