Do you remember the following press release from December 10, 2024?
Many of you will now remember it, because this press release was widely repeated by the kinds of people who like to repeat press releases. But do you know what happened next? Let me give you a clue: there have be no follow-up press releases bragging about the action taken by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The next graph shows what happened to the number of entries in the regulator’s Robocall Mitigation Database since the press release was issued, with weekly additions marked in green, withdrawals from the database marked in red, and amendments to database entries marked in yellow.
You do not need eagle eyes or the skills of the world’s greatest data ninja to notice that relatively few telcos have changed their entry, or been removed from the Robocall Mitigation Database, despite the warning that was issued to 2,411 telcos over six months ago. They were told deficient filings had to be corrected before the end of 2024. In practice, the majority ignored the warning and ignored the deadline, but the FCC has said nothing about the topic since.
Commsrisk will soon launch a new information service that will be completely free of charge. It will be aimed at regulators because they need reliable information to make good policy decisions. If others want to use the service then that will be up to them; I no longer need to pander to the many organizations that prefer misinformation to facts. The service will present data like the graph shown above, except that the data will be automatically updated on a regular basis. This will draw upon information from the public and the private sector that is pertinent to tackling crime and protecting consumers from harm. When figures go up, it will show them going up, and when figures go down, it will show them going down. There will be no cherrypicking of statistics, nor projections of what might happen in future without any revisiting of what actually happened over time.
That is it. That is the post. There is clearly a problem with professionals in the comms sector being influenced by the crap that is included in press releases instead of familiarizing themselves with the available data and critiquing its quality. Dubious sources of information can still be useful if there is scrutiny of how they trend over time, but even that modest discipline has been negated by the unhealthy obsession with dishonest one-off headlines. Manipulating statistics when nobody is looking is one of the oldest tricks in the book, so Commsrisk will use automation to continually follow the statistics and present them without any bias in one convenient place.
Monitoring statistics can be the difference between believing a regulator is conducting their umpteenth successful crackdown on illegality and noticing that no actual crackdowns ever occurred. It will also tell us who had policies that actually delivered results, and who just slips from one failed policy to another because nobody is holding them to account.
