Saturday, March 30, 2019

Ars Technica reports on ROBOCALLS: FCC “fined” robocallers $208 million since 2015 but collected only $6,790 -- Both FCC and FTC fail to collect vast majority of robocall fines, WSJ reports. By: Jon Brodkin - Mar 28, 2019 - 9:17 pm UTC

Without use of teeth, there is no bite. Why no bite? The Trump Justice Department has litigation jurisdiction, the FCC referring its actions to the Trump Justice Department. Ars noted tersely:

The Justice Department declined to comment.

Ars fleshes out:

Since Ajit Pai became FCC chairman in January 2017, the FCC has issued $202 million in forfeiture orders against robocallers but has collected none of it, the Journal wrote. That includes a $120 million penalty issued in May 2018 against a robocaller that was accused of making 96 million robocalls during a three-month period in order to trick people into buying vacation packages.

Separately, the Federal Trade Commission has collected $121 million out of $1.5 billion worth of penalties issued against robocallers since 2004, the Journal report said. An FTC spokesperson told the Journal that it is proud of its 8 percent collection rate.

"The dearth of financial penalties collected by the US government for violations of telemarketing and auto-dialing rules shows the limits the sister regulators [FCC and FTC] face in putting a stop to illegal robocalls," the Journal wrote. "It also shows why the threat of large fines can fail to deter bad actors." Fines can be "a deterrent on legitimate companies that have real assets in the US," but they aren't as effective against scammers and overseas operators, an attorney quoted by the Journal said.

Earlier in the item, an FCC spokesperson is quoted:

"Many of the spoofers and robocallers the agency tries to punish are individuals and small operations, [the spokesman] added, which means they are at times unable to pay the full penalties."

The criminals are ATT, Verizon, etc., the scumbags that sell the robocall capability to the small fry.

Fry the big fish, put the million dollars of penalties on them, consolidate things into a single action, and collect. the fine should be twice the revenue selling the robocall capability produced for the carriers. Biting them would fix things in an eyeblink. Why is it NOT being done, by the Trump Administration and the Senate Republicans? Surely the House Democrat majority would cooperate on bipartisan law, as needed. But the industry runs the agency; and the public suffers while paying the agency salaries - Trump Justice Department included.

UPDATE; Surely readers can dispute that the industry runs the regulators; that the system is captured by the imates running the asylum; however, Ars concludes with this insight [bolded and italics emphasis added, links omitted}:

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, one of two Democrats on the Republican-controlled commission, wants stronger action.

"I've called for carriers to make free tools to block robocalls available to every consumer," she wrote on Twitter today. She also criticized the FCC's poor record in collecting fines: "It's time for my colleagues [to] join me in this effort."

The lack of follow-through on big fines isn't new to Pai's FCC. The FCC in 2015 proposed a fine of $100 million against AT&T for throttling the wireless Internet connections of customers with unlimited data plans without adequately notifying the customers about the reduced speeds. But AT&T fought the proposed penalty, and the FCC apparently never issued a forfeiture order in that case.
So regarding the capture of the regulators by the perps; is there any doubt which party it is that is allowing robocalling to be a nuisance nationwide, with the blessing of that party's rank and file, from dog catcher to President?

Go figure.

The same perps killed net neutrality which shall remain dead until the Democratic Party gains control; and then we see who is a legitimate Democrat and who is a Republican-lite creep masquerading as a Democrat. At which time it will be a second broom time; first sweep out the actual declared Republicans; then do a second sweep of all the Democrat impostors; i.e., closet Republicans, hiding who they really are.