The thrust of the article seems to be “we had a good thing going, some of you took it too far, and I TOLD YOU if you kept taking it too far we’d all lose our good thing, and now look at what you’ve done”.

For what it’s worth, whenever one of those “lead generator”-type calls gets past my filters, I take their number and the number of whatever company they’re advertising and sign both of them up to a bunch of those lead generator websites

> For what it’s worth, whenever one of those “lead generator”-type calls gets past my filters, I take their number and the number of whatever company they’re advertising and sign both of them up to a bunch of those lead generator websites

Don't the spammers spoof innocent people's numbers? If so, you're probably punishing someone unrelated.

Scammers do, but I would be surprised if any of these companies do. It sounds like they're "legit" by the letter of the (current) law if not the spirit, which is why they would care about the FCC banning this. The scammers' operations are just plain illegal.

“ Don't the spammers spoof innocent people's numbers? ”

Oh, they do? I wasn’t aware this was a thing. I’ll only sign up the business from now on.

oh yeah, the whole STIR/SHAKEN thing is because calls and sms are essentially email: the sender just includes metadata saying who they are. Without any additional work you can a given call/message can claim to be whoever you want. This would be fine if carriers actually required it to be correct, but intrinsically if a call comes in to your carrier from another carrier your carrier has to trust the originator actually enforced this. But there are carriers whose primary market is "marketing companies", and so they are not ... careful ... about ensuring the originator isn't spouting nonsense. The FCC just recently told all major US carriers that they were required to drop connections from a couple of such carriers.

I'm sure there's a more complexity in how this actually all works in the real world, but this is my basic high level understanding of it.

Yep. I've received spam texts purportedly from my own phone number before.

Many use phone number validation/verification services that know if it's a personal or business number.

I can assure you that there are many "lead generation" companies that will happily sell businesses data to other businesses for "calling".

I’d personally like to see the FCC proposal enacted and am willing to see the valuable uses lost to make sure the bad uses are indefensible.

But the “good uses” actually had been a win for small and local businesses. With too much real and fake content online for directories to be practical, lead generation sites became a successor to the yellow pages for a lot of small businesses.

Users look for a masseuse or roofer, fill out a qualifier form at a lead generation site operated by a tech company, and the business operators who may not even have a website can qualify the lead and submit a pitch.

They weren’t perfect and are still subject to abuse, but they were a working solution for a lot of people who weren’t going to (and don’t really need to) build an impressive website and marketing strategy.

But like I said, stuff happens and times change, so if that system gets tossed for the sake of all the adjacent abuse, so be it. I’m sure some new technique will fill the underlying niche.

Companies could still do that, except they'd have to act as a broker instead of just sending leads to every single contractor they have on their list.

Instead they'd have to send information to the contractors, the contractors would have to submit quotes or whatever information back, then the "lead generator" would send said info to the customer in one email, text, etc. that the customer could then call/opt-in to calls with specific contractors.

I assumed from tone that the article was surprised/happy it was happening, but I’m gonna be honest I only skimmed enough to read what the three proposals were.

These are fantastic changes. I can’t wait. If public support is needed seems like that wouldn’t be hard to drum up.

No, the author is a lawyer specializing in defending companies accused of spamming.

His public position, probably mostly genuine, is that there are good guys and bad guys and he helps protect the good guys from getting hit with tools meant for the bad guys.

Here, he laments that the good guys might get screwed by upcoming regulation and need to speak up and make sure there are carve outs for them.

I’ve had the fun of working with the “but we are the good ones“ kind of spammers before.

Sigh.

Thanks.

He works for an "industry" that entirely in the schlepping, hording, repackaging and re-schlepping private information for profit.

Disincentivizing this niche of marketing and driving companies to invest and build their own effective leads generators in-house is better for literally everyone but lawyers in the "leads generation industry."

> His public position, probably mostly genuine, is that there are good guys and bad guys

Yes, and I think he's genuine about that. That's how he sleeps at night.

But the reality is that there are bad guys and worse guys.

So from his point of view there is a meaningful difference between two groups of spammers, when both of them are just spammers.

The OP doesn't appear to be complaining. The conclusion of the article is basically that the field is full enough of bad actors to justify drastic action like this.

That's kind of missing the point. The article is up in arms that companies which only want to spam you with legitimate products (in a product category similar to whatever you signed up for) won't get to do so, because of those bad actors, the multi-vertical spammers and scammers. OP is complaining that the industry brought this upon themselves by failing to self-regulate and stop the bad actors in time to avert regulatory attention.

The reality of course is that all text message spammers are bad actors, just less bad than the worst of the worst. It is probably is true that failure to self-regulate is what brought this down on the industry, but the industry as a whole deserves it and everyone will be happy to see it gone, except for the unscrupulous handful who make a profit off of it.

I think the author also wants to get the proposed regulation modified before it goes into force, to make it weaker. Of course I want the opposite: it should be made stronger rather than weaker.

The article defends parts of spammers as legitimate industry that for now remains legal in USA.

Hopefully it will change.