It seemed like a good idea when the UK’s Labour government merged the national telecoms regulator with media regulators in 2003. The internet was already causing the boundaries between private communications and public broadcasting to become blurred. A politician can now use Twitter to send a direct message to a single person or to publish a tweet read by millions of followers, whilst a podcaster speaking into a microphone in their home office might regularly reach a much larger audience than many TV channels. But in hindsight, the creation of mega-regulators like Britain’s Ofcom has resulted in even less attention being paid to ‘boring’ topics like consumer protection. Politicians and the media want the focus to always be on them, so whilst the British public should be hearing a range of opinions on how to protect them from fraudulent websites and scam phone calls — forms of communication they cannot choose to avoid — Ofcom’s top brass are obsessed with questions about censoring political opinion — although anyone can simply choose not to listen to politicians they disagree with.
The skewed presentation of consumer affairs relating to electronic comms is not a trivial concern. New technologies prompt changes in human behavior and people rely on comms services more than ever. However, the authorities are struggling to keep pace with change. The US audience for Commsrisk has grown enormously during the last two years because nobody was publicly stating what most industry insiders were willing to privately admit: STIR/SHAKEN is a disastrously flawed way of reducing robocalls. Mainstream US media just repeats the press releases issued by the FCC because they are now incapable of challenging anything the FCC says or does unless a Democrat or Republican faction has already expressed a critical opinion. Meanwhile, no US politician is challenged about the reasons both main parties supported the evolution of a legal framework which already encouraged enormous numbers of unsolicited calls and messages, not least from the politicians themselves. Thankfully, the demonstrably poor results delivered in practice have given the occasional insider the confidence to openly criticize STIR/SHAKEN.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the supposedly impartial BBC has utterly failed the British public by acting as a cheerleader for STIR/SHAKEN in a fashion that is so one-sided that even Ofcom has sometimes been embarrassed as a result. Now try to imagine a scenario where a biased BBC journalist, whose only knowledge comes from big businesses lobbying for the implementation of STIR/SHAKEN, criticizes Ofcom for not mandating its implementation, then has to be held to account by… Ofcom, the regulator of media bias. There is no longer anyone with the authority and independence to reliably present the facts about electronic comms to the public when a cross-section of society’s leaders and opinion-makers do otherwise.
Commsrisk is going to have to become more political in tone because I can see no way around the conundrum created by regulators that do lousy work which is overly-politicized whilst comms services become increasingly vital to every aspect of life. Much of the lobbying for call authentication has come from banks because serving a bank’s customers via their phones is cheaper than serving them in person, but banks do not want the liability for all the frauds enabled by the transition away from in-person services. A simplistic analysis of the type routinely favored by BBC journalists — they tend to portray telcos as bad businesses which need tougher oversight from the regulator — does nothing to educate the public about the implausibility of making a network operator responsible for all the information and misinformation that can be conveyed by wave or wire. Some problems cannot be solved by simply deciding that artificial intelligence will miraculously purge networks of all the harm done by people who have nothing to do with networks, and who are never held accountable for the way they behave.
Risk managers have spent the last few decades calling for more ‘joined up’ thinking but the trend in government and regulators has gone the other way: they compensate for a lack of strategic vision with an increasing number of knee-jerk reactions to the problems they eventually identify. The result is the kind of decision-making appropriate for a 24/7 news cycle whilst being utterly useless for long-term planning. And so we end up with the idiocy of Ofcom recently asserting it was the ‘right time’ to decide whether to implement STIR/SHAKEN. If you uncritically believe that politics had no influence on Ofcom’s timing, then you must also believe:
- Now is the right time to push a STIR/SHAKEN plan that was written for Ofcom by a US lobbyist two years ago
- Now is not the right time to make any effort to update or alter the plan to reflect the poor results obtained in the USA during those two years
- Now is not the right time to perform a thorough evaluation of all the anti-scam options, as has just been completed by Ireland’s comms regulator with the conclusion Ireland rejected STIR/SHAKEN in favor of anti-scam controls that will protect consumers much sooner
- Now is the right time to commit the UK to the implementation of technology which cannot be used until the UK’s networks are ready, which is scheduled to be at the end of 2025
- It was just a coincidence that Ofcom issued an anti-scam consultation at the same time as the UK government sought a lot of positive press coverage by exaggerating the significance of some modest promises to tackle fraud
- And it was just a coincidence that many of the promises made by the UK government at that time were just repeats of promises they previously made
- And it was just a coincidence that this all occurred during a local government election campaign where the ruling Conservative Party was predicted to (and did) suffer extensive losses, and hence during a period when the government were prohibited from making announcements on policies that affect local government, but could still make announcements on national policies, such as a ‘new’ national plan for combatting fraud
We live in societies that need to do a better job of managing all the risks associated with widespread technological change. That means we should be managing the risks based on the objective analysis of the best data available. But decisions are not currently made that way. Separating regulators from government has not improved the situation, because regulators are now as obsessed with their media coverage as politicians are. The executives who lead regulators fully appreciate the interests of the politicians that appoint them, which is why they increasingly support bad proposals because they will sound good to a journalist with a short attention span. Both politicians and their minions care too much about the daily news cycle at the expense of thoughtful planning for the future.
Perhaps I generalize too much; the leaders of countries I am less familiar with may hold themselves to a higher standard. But then I look at how many governments and political parties have corruptly exploited comms services to the detriment of ordinary people and I feel less hopeful. So rather than do what most others will do — keep quiet about serious problems because speaking out may be unprofitable, whilst uncritically repeating whatever garbage is included in the latest press release — I believe it is now necessary to explicitly discuss the negative consequences of over-politicizing important decisions about the way comms networks and services are managed. The boundaries between private and public comms have collapsed. Genuine experts working within the communications industry must find the courage to openly discuss problems and how they might be solved, or else it may not be long before politicians are solving all problems by tasking us to control what is said privately too.
