This exact claim gets made in every single robocall conversation on HN. I've never looked, maybe it's always the same people making it? Pretty soon someone else from Germany will be along to tell you about how many robocalls they get. And someone from the US will mention they also get no robocalls.
And as an American who lives in the UK, I always make the exact same response, and I'm continually surprised that people still don't understand.
In the US, the person receiving the call / text pays for the airtime to the cell phone. So sending out a million text messages costs almost nothing, because the expensive part is borne by the receivers.
In the UK and EU, the person sending the call / text pays for the airtime to the cell phone. This price is defined by a government regulator is owed by the sender's network to the owner of the cell tower.
So if some random person sends a text to me, and I'm using an O2 tower, that person has to pay O2 something like £0.20; meaning to send a million text messages would cost you £200k.
The result is that I do get spam messages, but they're always far more directed: normally organizations that I've actually interacted with in the past. Sending a message to a thousand previous customers is a lot more cost-effective (I presume) than sending a message to tens of millions of random phone numbers.
Ironically, the absolute easiest way to solve the US's spam call/text problem is actually market-based: make the caller pay for the entire path of the call, all the way to the receiver.
> In the US, the person receiving the call / text pays for the airtime to the cell phone.
Except few of us actually do. Most plans are unlimited for calls and texts at least. If there's a limit, it's on data.
> The result is that I do get spam messages
Ah, but I'm in the US and I don't get any spam texts :). I do get some robocalls though. It's not an easy to solve problem.
> make the caller pay for the entire path of the call, all the way to the receiver
I think the complication here is that the source of the calls and texts are not other mobile phones. They're coming onto the network via SIP. The billing mechanism to bill all the way back to the sender might be impossible with the current technologies being used. I can send an email to make a text appear on my phone, and this is a feature I have used occasionally -- how do I bill for that?
> Except few of us actually do. Most plans are unlimited for calls and texts at least. If there's a limit, it's on data.
Whether you pay per-SMS or whether you pay bulk for "unlimited" calls and texts, you're still paying for the path from the tower to your phone. Calling a cell phone in the US is the same price as calling a landline.
In the UK, it's possible to buy a phone that has no outgoing minutes or texts. This is useful because people can still call you. In fact, at some point there was a provider that would pay you a "cut" on every SMS or phone call you received. And calling a mobile phone -- whether you're calling from a landline or another mobile phone -- is more expensive than calling a landline.
Which is almost certainly one of the key problems with implementing such a system in the US: in the UK and Europe, mobile phone numbers look obviously different than landline numbers, so you know ahead of time that the call is going to cost you more. In the US, they look the same, so you'd never know how much you would get charged.
> The billing mechanism to bill all the way back to the sender might be impossible with the current technologies being used
If you call my mobile phone, my mobile operator will be paid for that call one way or another; I'm pretty sure neither they nor any of the companies in between your phone provider and mine are going to give it away for free out of the goodness of their hearts. Which means the charge-back mechanism is already in place; it's just not used in the US.
Normally it's American exceptionalism — assuming the USA is better than every other country. I think this is the first time I've seen someone assuming that since America has a problem, other countries must have it too.
> assuming the USA is better than every other country
Do you really see that happening? "America Bad" is the dominant theme online, including on HN. I see -way- more "gosh I don't understand why America sucks so bad, it's totally perfect over here in Europe" than I see Americans claiming that the US is automatically superior. I feel like in the US we're playing defense way more often, trying to explain misunderstandings and ignorance about how things work here.
To be clear, there are definitely things that work better in Europe. But there are things that the US does pretty well too. Nobody likes to hear that.
No, it's true, I was surprised to get a robocall a few months ago, because it was the first ever (I think) and I have had my number since >10 years now. It's just not a thing here, I've never heard anyone complain about robocalls.
It's only a couple of years ago that I learned that "robocalls", which I'd seen mentioned for, what, a decade or more?, are actually fully robotic and not just a telemarketing department using an autodialer for more or less cold calls.
That's how weird this phenomenon is to a european. To me it was a solid "WTF?" moment. Since then I've wondered why I've never heard about US:ians tracking down these operations and destroying them.
