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The Telecom Digest
Wednesday, May 3, 2023

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Copyright © 2023 E. William Horne. All Rights Reserved.
Volume 42 Table of Contents Issue 123
New Hamshire VoIP provider asks FCC Chairwoman for help
We must oppose the S.686 - the RESTRICT act
More FCC pirate crackdowns
Message-ID: <20230430231727.GA188317@telecomdigest.us> Date: 30 Apr 2023 19:17:27 -0400 From: "The Telecom Digest" <submissions@telecom-digest.org> Subject: New Hamshire VoIP provider asks FCC Chairwoman for help April 6, 2023 (Via ECFS) Federal Communications Commission 445 12th Street Washington, DC 20554 Re: WC Docket 17-97 - Call Authentication Trust Anchor Dear Chairwoman Rosenworcel, We are a relatively small VoIP provider based in Nashua, New Hampshire with customers around the country spanning from large auto dealerships to over 1,200 restaurants. Recently, over the past few months, we began to receive complaints from our customers regarding a change in the presentation of Caller ID, particularly the CNAM (or customer name) portion. The complaints ranged from calls being labeled "spam risk" to "city, state" and other misleading labels. We've been Stir/Shaken compliant for several months and sign all of our calls. The removal of CNAM and the mislabeling of our calls has served to create harm both to our customers' businesses and to our reputation as their provider. The worst of this is the resulting lack of faith developing in the public phone system's seeming inability to label calls correctly as well as calls not completing because called parties are not answering their phones because the customer name is missing or the call is mislabeled. I would like to chalk this up to the law of unintended consequences but the fact remains that this recent phenomenon has been somewhat of a secret. We received no pertinent information from any of our upstream partners that would have indicated that this practice was occurring and what the possible remedy or remedies might be. As a matter of fact, we only discovered the possible reasons for this after doing a fair amount of digging via repeated Google searches uncovering companies like Hiya, TNS and First Orion that we understand are responsible for call analytics. https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/10406144565925/1
Message-ID: <20230501142103.GA193145@telecomdigest.us> Date: 1 May 2023 10:21:03 -0400 From: "The Telecom Digest" <submissions@telecom-digest.org> Subject: We must oppose the S.686 - the RESTRICT act The Senate is currently considering a law that could make censorship in the United States much easier. It’s called the RESTRICT Act, and while it’s still early in the legislative process, the bill already has bipartisan support. In its current state, the RESTRICT Act gives the feds massive power to monitor and police U.S. citizens online. It does so by allowing the Secretary of Commerce to conduct security reviews of tech that is even partially owned by companies from any “foreign adversary.” (Who is a foreign adversary? Any country the secretary says. Seriously.) https://go.thefire.org/webmail/869921/1503930501/d9fd308004d8099f4711a5d74c525552769ffc82265d6680ac06999668c284d5
Moderator's Note
The one thing which gets the attention of elected officials is numbers, and the only way to be counted is to write a hand-written note to both of your senators and to your Congressman. They ignore all electronic messages - their software counts the keywords, and sends them a graph - and they give lip service to typed postal mail (some just weigh it).
They do, however, pay a LOT of attention to hand-written letters. They are impossible to forge (No, you can't just use a "script" font), and they are the most certain way I know of to be sure you'll be heard.
- Bill Horne
Message-ID: <u2omje$2ek3$1@usenet.csail.mit.edu> Date: 1 May 2023 15:41:34 -0000 From: "Garrett Wollman" <wollman@bimajority.org> Subject: More FCC pirate crackdowns Earlier this year we discussed the FCC's new authority under the so-called PIRATE Act to go after landlords of pirate broadcasters. In his weekly NorthEast Radio Watch newsletter, my friend Scott Fybush reports today: The FCC’s effort to crack down on pirate operators by going after their landlords took a new turn last week when 16 property owners in New York and New Jersey received notices from the Commission warning them that unlicensed signals were coming from their locations, subjecting them to the possibility of fines as high as $2 million if the broadcasts continued. The list included stations in Brooklyn on 91.9, 95.9, 97.5, 98.9, 99.7, 100.7 and 107.9, in the Bronx on 88.9 and 101.7, in St. Albans, Queens on 88.5, in Newark on 87.9, in Irvington on 88.5 and 90.9, in Maplewood on 90.7, in Orange on 102.1 and in Paterson on 99.3. No indication yet as to whether this aggressive approach is actually having an effect. The law requires the FCC's Enforcement Bureau to make an annual list of the pirate-broadcasting hotspots and report to Congress on its enforcement efforts there. -GAWollman --
Garrett A. Wollman | “Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can, wollman@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future. This is Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together.” my employers. | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)
End of The Telecom Digest for Wed, 3 May, 2023
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