Brazilians receive more unwanted calls than any other nationality. This has encouraged big Brazilian businesses to voluntarily pursue radical methods of undermining irresponsible telemarketers who generate excessive numbers of robocalls so that the remainder can continue to reach customers. One example of the unique Brazilian strategy is their idiosyncratic variant of STIR/SHAKEN, a method that attaches digital signatures to phone calls and which gained prominence after the US and Canadian regulators mandated its use. Whilst the North American version is obligatory for all calls passing over IP networks, and is easily subverted due to weak know-your-customer controls in the businesses which authorize STIR/SHAKEN signatures, Brazil’s focus has exclusively been on telemarketing calls, and is meant to reassure recipients about who made them. The handsets of Brazilians who receive signed calls will be shown:
- the name of the company that is calling them;
- that company’s logo; and
- the reason for the call.
This is much more likely to influence a decision about whether to accept the call than the meager information presented to a North American who receives a signed call. North Americans get a tick mark if the call has an authorized signature (which is worse than useless if a bad actor has succeeded in subverting the system) and they may get a warning about whether the call is spam (which is inaccurate so often that good actors keep complaining about it).
Another important contrast between the North American and Brazilian approach is the timeliness of progress. The North American implementation was beset by delays, adding several years to their roll-out. Brazil, which has no deadline because there is no regulatory requirement, has fallen no more than a few months behind the schedule that companies imposed upon themselves. Mobile Time reports that the leading Brazilian operators should complete testing by the end of March, whilst others will settle for a target of concluding their roll-out by the middle of the year. Brazil benefits from the learning curve by commencing work later than the USA and Canada, but it can also be argued that Brazil is being more ambitious because their variant is not limited to IP networks and it promises to present a lot more information to phone users. So why is Brazil able to make much more impressive progress than their peers in North America?
There is one simple explanation for why Brazil is moving forward so rapidly without the need for any heavy-handed regulatory intervention. Brazil’s strategy is grounded in unambiguous economic incentives for everyone who will spend money on implementing the Brazilian style of call validation. Telemarketing businesses serve a purpose if recipients answer their calls; their business model is defunct if ordinary phone users reject every telemarketing call. So if Brazilians are plagued by far more unwanted and unscrupulous calls from Brazilian businesses then telemarketing businesses are faced with one of two choices: either they enter a race to the bottom involving ever more robocalls and hence a steep decline in their completion rate, or they adopt self-imposed standards of behavior which separate responsible telemarketing businesses from the scum that poisons the well. This means the big reputable telemarketing companies want to pay for validation of their calls, and this includes enhanced features like the presentation of a company logo and an explanation for why the call is being made. And because they are willing to pay, this service is also going to be a healthy revenue stream for network operators. An operator can sell access to their STIR/SHAKEN service because there is a willing market for it. The sooner they implement it, the sooner they start making money from it, obviating any need for the regulator to impose deadlines.
The contrast to North American thinking cannot be starker. The North American vendors of STIR/SHAKEN expect to make a lot of money from STIR/SHAKEN but only because they rely on regulators to intervene. They expect regulators to make poorly-evidenced arguments about billions of dollars of fraud losses being stemmed by STIR/SHAKEN, meaning there is no effective upper limit to costs per their cost-benefit analysis, and hence no limit to the amounts telcos are expected to spend on implementing STIR/SHAKEN. This approach may be effective in rich countries like the USA but it is also greedy and short-sighted. Governments of poorer countries will be more conscious that every dollar spent on a US vendor is a dollar that was not collected in tax or included in the pay packet of a local employee. As a consequence, STIR/SHAKEN will never provide comprehensive protection to phone users because it will not be implemented from origin-to-destination for all international calls.
The goal in North America is to create a kind of utopian national call screening logic for all types of calls, whether they are telemarketing or not, and whether they originate within the country or overseas. The Brazilian strategy is unconcerned with the wider problem of spoofed calls, partly because the Portuguese language acts as a partial barrier to unwanted international calls. Brazil could hence concentrate on reaching consensus for a model that tackles the principle source of unwanted calls: telemarketing by unscrupulous Brazilian businesses. Mobile Time beautifully sums up the elegance of the Brazilian approach at the conclusion of their article:
Será implementada de acordo com a lógica do mercado para cada operadora e a estratégia das empresas.
It will be implemented according to the market logic for each operator and the companies’ strategy.
