Commissioner Starks Seeks Industry Plans on Call Blocking

On Monday, June 10, 2019, the Commission announced that Commissioner Geoffrey Starks sent letters to major voice service providers seeking details about their plans to offer free, default call blocking services to consumers to combat robocalls, following the adoption of the Unlawful Robocalls Declaratory Ruling and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in the June Open Meeting.

Commissioner Starks sent letters to executives of 14 major phone and voice service providers seeking details about how and when they pan to roll out default call blocking and whether they intend to charge consumers for these services. Specifically, the letters ask the companies to:

1. Indicate whether they will offer customers default call blocking services on an informed opt-out basis, and if so, provide details of these plans with a timeline for implementation;
2. Describe how they intend to inform customers about the service;
3. Indicate whether they expect to act contrary to the Commission’s expectations, and charge customers for these services; and
4. If they do no currently plan to offer these blocking services, explain why.

These identical letters were sent to AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, Bandwidth. com, CenturyLink, Charter, Comcast, Cox Communications, Frontier, Google, TDS, USCellular, and Vonage.

Responses are due July 10, 2019 via email to Commissioner Starks.

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