Industry Says New Caller ID Rules Would Do More Harm Than Good

CTIA reminded the FCC that the voice “ecosystem” is undergoing a “fundamental transformation” from traditional plain old telephone service to all-IP calling. “Branded calling solutions can offer enhanced vetting of enterprise callers that sign up, in order to give consumers better information about who is calling and why,” CTIA said. However, “mandating a particular branded calling solution,” such as rich call data (RCD)-based branded calling “before the voice ecosystem has transitioned to all-IP networks would be premature,” the group said.

CTIA also said that despite its early stages, the marketplace for enterprise branded solutions is “competitive, robust and rapidly developing.” A “one-size-fits-all” requirement for verifying callers “could quickly become obsolete given rapid innovation in the digital identity vetting marketplace.”

“The record supports proceeding incrementally and with caution,” USTelecom advised. Comments confirm that Stir/Shaken is a limited tool “designed to authenticate the calling number and the originating provider’s relationship to that number, not to identify who is calling or to determine whether a call is legitimate,” the group said. It should be viewed as a single input “among many in a layered robocall mitigation strategy that also includes analytics, blocking, traceback, and enforcement,” USTelecom said.

The Competitive Carriers Association warned against adopting “prescriptive, technology-specific obligations that risk undermining innovation.” Rules now could create “false consumer confidence” and inadvertently harm consumers, “particularly if adopted before standards, analytics, and interoperability continue to mature,” CCA said.

AT&T said the commission should reconsider a proposal to require terminating service providers to transmit verified caller names, which would show up on consumer handsets, whenever “call authentication information indicates the calling number is a fully validated number.” Doing so could “have the unintended effect of providing additional validity to calls that may be illegally spoofed,” the carrier said, citing concerns with the quality of the information transmitted through Stir/Shaken.

NCTA said RCD and other branded calling services “remain in development” and “are not yet uniformly deployed.” It said that given the concerns raised in initial comments, the FCC should wait before imposing new regulation. Any rule requiring the use of RCD or any branded calling “would prematurely lock the industry into a specific technology very early in its development and years before the technology can be implemented effectively,” NCTA said.

Verizon said the FCC should prioritize “flexible, market-led strategies” and avoid “new prescriptive regulatory obligations.” Carriers are already “embracing a range of effective call labeling and blocking, branded calling solutions, anti-spoofing products and services, and other tools” as they compete to offer customers a “superior experience,” Verizon said.

The Consumer Access & Choice Coalition, which represents small, nomadic VoIP providers, said the call‑labeling market is still in early stages “with diverse technologies and competing approaches to address evolving robocall threats.” The FCC should resist “prematurely locking the industry into a specific technical standard or vendor‑driven model, whether through reliance on a handful of analytics providers or a single attestation architecture.” If protective technology becomes narrowly defined or is constrained by regulation, “bad actors will quickly learn to exploit its limits, undermining the consumer protection goals the Commission seeks to advance,” the coalition said.