The age of the traditional phone system is ended.<p>Years ago, bills were introduced Congress that would've made falsifying Caller ID illegal, but certain people said it would be too onerous for small businesses. One bill passed in the House and was sent to the Senate, where it was promptly ignored (H.R.251 - Truth in Caller ID Act of 2007).<p>Lots of people, both those who know nothing about technology and those who know enough to know better, say this isn't enforceable because too many people are doing it.<p>Bullshit. Like spam, if you establish punishment for those who allow spam, you have a very simple mechanism for enforcement.<p>In the old days, when we got spam, we'd forward it to the administrators of the system that sent it or the administrators of the network where it originated. They'd warn, punish, and/or remove the person / system responsible for the spam.<p>These days, abuse@yahoo.com doesn't work, GoDaddy, Cloudflare and others won't do shit unless you find their web page for reporting abuse, then jump through hoops to shoehorn the spam in to their intentionally shitty web page, and even then they pretty much ignore it. Google just ignores everything sent to abuse@google.com.<p>Imagine if every spam that's ignored led to a fine. It'd be chaos and mayhem, but within a year we'd be back to how things were in the early '90s. Of course that wouldn't affect spam from the rest of the world, but imagine if large US networks stopped accepting email entirely from Chinanet until they started acting on abuse complaints.<p>The same can be done with Caller ID. You've got a T1 that lets you set your own Caller ID? Great. You might not get caught, but you can set what you want.<p>Your upstream provider might ignore it, but they connect somewhere larger, too. So let's say AT&T customers are getting complaints about phone calls with false Caller ID, and AT&T looks in their logs and sees that they're coming from your upstream. Now your upstream is in trouble unless they fix it. If they don't, they get a nice hefty fine.<p>How do they fix it? They force you to stop. If you don't, it's illegal, so they can contact the authorities. Or, they could just terminate you.<p>This is just like egress filtering in the networking world. If your network is passing along lots of spoofed traffic and someone contacts you to tell you, and you just pretend it's not your problem, you should be punished. You shouldn't allow traffic to leave your network that claims to be from sources that aren't on your network.<p>"But routing!" Bullshit. If it's coming on to your network from elsewhere, you should be required to say from where, so the originating network can be identified.<p>However, businesses don't want to be bothered putting any time or energy in to this. Businesses rarely do a thing because it's the right thing to do, unless they can make it a marketable advantage. They need to be forced to do this by law, by threat of loss of money.<p>Caller ID spoofing should've been illegal all along, and businesses which do nothing about it should be punishable. Because that's not the case, the old fashioned phone system might as well completely die.