FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced today that unless the telecommunications industry takes steps to combat illegal caller ID spoofing and adopt a robust call authentication system by 2019, then the Commission “will take action to make sure that it does.” In his press release, Commissioner Pai also said that “[c]ombatting illegal robocalls” is the agency’s top consumer priority. In addition to requesting an industry-led solution, Chairman Pai also sent letters to the leaders of 14 companies asking them to establish “concrete plans” to protect their customers by using Signature-based Handling of Asserted Information Useking toKENs (SHAKEN) and the Secure Telephone Identity Revisited (STIR) standards and to do so without delay. Earlier this year, Chairman Pai accepted the recommendations of the North American Numbering Council (NANC) to implement the SHAKEN/STIR framework. The companies receiving Chairman Pai’s letters demanding an end to illegal call spoofing include AT&T, Bandwidth.com, CenturyLink, Charter, Comcast, Cox, Frontier, Google, Sprint, TDS, T-Mobile, US Cellular, Verizon and Vonage.
