At its July 17 public meeting, the FCC took its latest step to curb unwanted and unlawful robocalls. The Commission adopted an order to implement the TRACED Act by establishing rules for two safe harbors from legal liability for voice service providers that block robocalls that they believe are unwanted or harmful. Those legal safe harbors will encourage voice service providers to combat unwanted and unlawful robocalls. Paragraph 19 of the Commission's order sums up the action taken in its order:
[W]e adopt a safe harbor from liability under the Communications Act and our rules for terminating voice service providers that block calls based on reasonable analytics designed to identify unwanted calls, so long as those take into account information provided by STIR/SHAKEN (or, for non-IP based calls, any other effective call authentication framework that satisfies the TRACED Act) when such information is available for a particular call. And we establish a second safe harbor enabling voice service providers to block traffic from bad-actor upstream voice service providers that continue to allow unwanted calls to traverse their networks. Finally, we require that blocking providers furnish a single point of contact to resolve unintended or inadvertent blocking, and emphasize that, when blocking, they should make all reasonable efforts to ensure that critical calls, such as those from Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs), are not blocked and that they should never block calls to 911.
Importantly, the order includes provisions for allowing blocked callers to reach voice service providers and seek the undoing of blockages of legit calls. The point of the safe harbors is to incentive blocking of unwanted and illegal calls and thereby protect consumers – and not to censor speech. This is an important measure adopted by the Commission and hopefully will lead to the reduction of bad robocalls.
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