The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) trademark licensing solution presented here is applicable to both telecommunication firms and telephone manufacturers addressing robocalls.
Simply put, the FTC creates the FTC TeleCom Robocall Blocker and FTC Manufacturer Robocall Blocker trademarks and then offers to license these trademarks, in a similar spirit to the extremely successful Energy Star trademark of the Environmental Protection Agency.
The solution has the potential reach to protect all consumers (those with land lines, mobile phones, VOIP phones).
The solution is trivial to use from the consumer’s perspective; they merely purchase the service. There is little opportunity for a consumer to make an error. A disabled consumer will find the solution no more difficult to use than a non-disabled consumer.
The solution has the flexibility to deal with future robocall technologies, and is capable of increasing the success rate and reducing the number of false positives over time.
The solution is inexpensive; asking a modest investment from participating firms, is self-funding from the FTC’s viewpoint, and is financed by the consumer. The solution has powerful incentives to orient the marketplace against robocalls.
The solution requires no changes to existing infrastructure or government regulation (although minor regulatory changes may improve outcomes), and can be deployed within weeks. Consumers would be able to take advantage of production systems within months after a firm makes a decision to license the trademark.
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