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Great idea!
Telemarketers have ruined the phone network for me. I haven't answered an unknown call for the past 10 years, which sometimes means I miss important ones. 99.9% of all calls are an attempt to get money, and the 0.1% that's a dentist appointment, a friend that changed numbers or whatever become collateral damage.
A ban is the right idea but I wonder how they can handle it, logistically. I think there needs to be a technical solution.
A national "whitelist", where hospitals, doctors, utility companies and such can register to get their numbers whitelisted perhaps, combined with a setting on phones that block any non-whitelist number.
Each country could maintain their own whitelists, and corrupt nations selling whitelist status to scammers would get blocked in any other country at least.
In Spain we have something called "Lista Robinson" (in Sweden exists something similar, called "NIX-registret") which are basically opt-in lists where you can enter your phone number, then once the new lists been distributed, the telemarketing companies cannot call you, if they're doing things properly. If they call anyway, you just mention you're on the list, they hang up, and remove your number from the list they have, eventually you stop getting calls.
I think in both countries these methods are supported by actual laws, one via "advertising-exclusion systems" that the companies need to respect, and in Sweden via the Swedish Marketing Act which forces companies to not call people who've "clearly objected to that method" or something similar. I'm sure similar laws and lists exists in other countries too. Obviously hospitals, doctors, utility companies and similar don't cross-reference against these lists, as they have actual relationship with you already.
Both in Sweden and in Spain I used to receive a lot of spam calls, like multiple per week, and once enrolled on these lists, the calls are non-existent, the only telemarketing calls I get now are from the companies I already have relationships with, which happens maybe once a month.
If you suffer greatly by the constant spam calls, like I did once before, do take a look and see if there are similar opt-out lists in your country :) They may take a month or two before actually eliminating all calls, but they do work, apparently.
I never understood what are the technical obstacles to building the phone network in such a way that caller numbers can not be spoofed or suppressed. Then, you could just build a system where receiving an unsolicited phone call from a commercial entity entitles you to a compensation in small claims court, to the tune of 50 EUR, unless the caller can prove that you explicitly authorised them.
The best technical solution I've seen is a spam review fee that turns into a reward and charged to the next closest originating peer.
For example say you get a spam call. You notify your service provider and pay $10 to have them review the call recording to verify that its spam. An employee listens to the call and determines that it is, in fact, spam. You get a $100 reward for reporting spam and your service provider forwards the charge (+10%=$110) to the peer network where the spam call originated. They will in turn forward it to the next peer, or if the originator is a customer, charge and/or close the offending account.
If this system is mandatory then the problem will quickly sort itself out.
I wonder how much we even need international calls from unknown numbers.
In my life I have literally never legitimately had a call from an unknown number outside of the country. I guess it could be different if you have many connections or business deals internationally. But I feel like the average person could restrict inbound international calls to contacts only and be better off for it.
Personally I think the trust model for phone calls has worn itself out. The network is too large, and the risk too great, for "guess this 10 digit number and you can call me any hour of the night" to be at all sustainable. In practice, if you aren't already in my contact list, my phone does not ring. (Otherwise it would be ringing all day long.) Telemarketers do seem to have realized that calling at night is unwise, for now. Relatives meanwhile...
I feel like if we were designing telephones as a brand new concept today, some sort of two-way handshake would be standard, right? Like a Friend Request on nearly any other network, before DMs can be sent. Phones were invented before we thought we had a practical need for such a flow, and the human-operated switching networks helped to somewhat discourage blatant abuse.
Can't remember right now if it's a EU or a Spain thing, but here they made mandatory to use real numbers on the Caller ID, so you can't use fake or hidden numbers for telemarketing. That way, of you're abusing, your line can easily be tracked, blocked or fined.
There has been some waves of spammer calls, more like "fake job offer calls" or things like that, coming from cell phone numbers, and there's still some telemarketing, but it is way way lower than, say, ten years ago. Orders of magnitude .
There doesn't need to be any kind of technical solution. If a telemarketer wants to sell something, they must declare the name of their company. The company name can be reported to police (or whatever authorities are going to handle this) who can then fine the telemarketers.
I think you may be overthinking it. In Sweden we already have a registry where we can opt out of telemarketing[1] (as well as ads in our physical mailboxes[2]). Generally this works well. Yes I still get a couple of "this is Microsoft calling" in Indian accent per year. Two spam calls per year isn't bad though. And this has worked for decades here, without special technical measures.
(Companies with which you already have a prior relation are allowed to call / mail you though, but this is always possible to opt out of.)
The whitelist managed by the government is not a bad idea.
I’ve been thinking how to turn the table so that you could allow only certain parties to reach you if you allowed them to (say you are waiting for a call from the auto repair shop).
I like the idea of a whitelist. But there needs to be a way for you to also manage that white list so that you can allow that repair shop to call you in the next few weeks.
This is a great move by France, but most of the rest of the world does not suffer from the telemarketing scam hell that Americans do.
I am a US citizen living overseas. I have a US cell number that is only used for 2FA for US financial institutions. No one else has that number. I get more scam calls every day on that number than I do in a year on my local number. It's crazy.
Most of the world has solved the worst of the problem by simply not allowing caller-ID spoofing and by blocking bad actors the way that ISPs block email coming from known bad IPs.
The US already has the STIR/SHAKEN authentication protocols, but the telcos seem to feel no financial or regulatory pressure to clamp down on all the sketchy intermediate carriers the scammers use to bypass them.
Maybe it's America's love of "market-based solutions" that prevents of from solving this problem the way everyone else has?
Rather then actually solve the problem via regulation, the US prefers to turn it into business opportunities to make the situation suck slightly less by letting the telcos sell subscriptions to moderately effective blocking programs and an creating an ecosystem of moderately effective apps.
My pet peeve is that a full class A attestation is still not a requirement in 2026. The US FCC won't do it. I have no hope from the current administration. However, perhaps France is in a unique position to implement this. The idea is that all calls that have a domestic caller ID will be required to have full class A attestation and all carriers will be required by law to block any calls that do not have such full attestation. Any carrier that attests phone numbers that it is not supposed to should get huge fines and criminal charges. This is my dream for what all Telecoms in the world should do, hopefully beginning with France. This requires broad support within the country and a firm deadline so companies don't shrug it off until the last moment and then demand an extension.
> On the other hand, France's new law has raised concerns in Morocco, where Employment Minister Younes Sekkouri, said in March that between 40,000 and 50,000 jobs were at risk in the country’s call centers. Sekkouri said the French market accounts for more than 80% of revenue in the sector.
Never build a business around hassling other people. It's always at risk that laws will suddenly change and destroy your livelihood; because good leadership will realize that the best approach to handling you is to exclude you from the negotiating table and abruptly cut you off.
This might come as a surprise to some people, but no one likes having their phone turned into a device that makes them listen to a commercial at random times throughout the day.
Kudos to France. But the problem isn't telemarketing calls. It's the wholesale grab-fest of phone numbers from every.damn.nook.and.crany of the US soil. Hospitals, Car dealers, dentists, vets, brokerages, title offices... literally EVERY one of them is leaking YOUR information to everyone in the world.
within a week of closing a deal on my house i get a scam paper mail that almost looked legit asking me to pay $100 to get the title documents for my house. There aren't that many parties involved in the sale.. and its one of them (or all of them) broke the trust and bartered my information.
nearly all of them are uploading their contact list to meta and google.
THIS practice has to stop.
Norway has the same law. I get no spam calls like this from Norway.
What I do get is spam calls from abroad. Often with a spoofed Norwegian number. Why can't operators block this? I know call centers and various things need to "spoof" a number they own, and when I myself call from abroad my Norwegian number will come from outside Norway.
But why can't they attest the numbers somehow? Owner of +47 XXXXXXX is currently not abroad. So why allow someone from the other side of the world to call me pretending to come from that number? Why does the Norwegian operators allow that?
Essentially useless. My country also banned them and has a "do not call" registry, doesn't stop scammers from calling my phone non-stop.
Also legally speaking all you need is "Check this box if you don't want spam" and the floodgates are open, legally.
You need telco-level detection and blocking. If a cellphone number makes 1000 calls today maybe it's not a real cellphone, is it. Block the calls.
The previous system never blocked scams because scammers didn't bother to check if your phone number was in the block-list before calling you.
That new law is not going to change the number of spam calls most people will get, as they're not from properly registered businesses.
The correct solution is just giving people the option to charge people for phoning them.
Say minimum wage is 12euro/hour, and declining a call takes about a minute of your attention, so this is worth at least 20cent.
Instead of just "Answer" and "Hang-Up", there should be a gov't enforced "charge caller 20cent" option.
This would have no impact on 'real' calls, nobody would charge their Mother and if someone is tacky enough to charge their GP or mechanic they could just be billed for it, and it would hardly be worth someone's trouble to try to steal a phone to call themselves to collect 20c, but it would totally ruin the economics of these spam calls.
The same should exist for emails.
In the last 2-3 years, my impression is that most french numbers receive daily unsolicited phone calls. In 2026 they even started sending scammy “missing delivery” text message with your real name printed on an attached MMS picture (on a parcel to deliver), making it even more real.
Related, there has been dozens of private data leaks in the last years in France
"God! I only asked her to be a hooker. It's not like I wanted her to work in telesales".
I stopped picking up unsolicited unknown calls perhaps a decade ago, and nothing was lost. It was impossible, however, to convince my 99-year-old grandma to do the same; she vehemently refuses because that would be 'impolite'. It would be great to have a tech solution for this, really, but I doubt printing another law is going to help with the scammier side of this market.
Related: https://saracroche.org/
This seems so much of a no-brainer to me due to scammy calls to elderly and pure time loss responding to calls it is interesting not much has been done about it in other countries. I guess the telemarketers have a good lobby.
That's great. Netherland banned them a couple of years ago. Unfortunately I still receive them. Sometimes a lot. A year or two ago, I received calls almost every week from a major TV/internet provider (Ziggo-Vodafone; total crooks). I told them not to call me again, I complained to the regulator, but as far as I can tell, nothing was ever done about it.
So banning it is great, but you still need to enforce that law.
And what about those marketing people who approach you on the streets? Can we make that illegal too? And the people going from door to door?
Until this law is ever applied, I warmly recommend my fellow french to install the «saracroche» app to filter out unsollicited calls.
It’s free, open source, all my family uses it for about 2 months now and it just works.
Btw, if it’s creator read this : thanks A LOT ! :)
In Brazil no one uses common phone lines anymore because, in part, of the telemarketers and scams calls. Most people I know enable “silence unknown callers” and use almost exclusively Whatsapp for communication.
The government tried to control this with an official (no call list) that is usually ignored by companies who use third parties and disposable mobile numbers to do their dirty work.
Telcos have the power to control that but they are usually an internal mess and this is low in their priority list as they consider the voice calls a lost battleground.
A perspective as I live in France:
- There was already an easy statewide system to opt-out of telemarketing calls
- Having always been on that system, I still got many scam calls that sound like telemarketing
So it's great to have a ban rather than an opt-out, but this will not solve the issue of scam calls
As long as message broadcasting remains cheap (in any form; phone, email, text, etc) it will go on. All modern media has evolved technically (and financially) to benefit the producer (the talker). All at the expense of the consumer (listener). Make outgoing bandwidth cost per instance and you’ll see a reduction/optimization of the production. When signal is free to produce, you end up with a lot of noise.
In my personal experience basically all spam calls in France come from a fixed set of number prefixes. [0]
So phone companies could just offer to block those prefixes - it would be a trivial solution to the problem. But it's not an option [1], so either they make good money from those calls, or there's some other hurdle or legal issue.
Either way the new law could (in addition to making it illegal for companies to make spam calls) also simply have mandated that network operators block the known ones. Too bad.
[0] https://lemagdelaconso.ouest-france.fr/dossier-2418-demarcha...
[1] https://communaute.orange.fr/t5/mon-telephone-par-internet-e...
Unless you can block illegal unsolicited scam/marketing calls, the medium of phone calls is dead to me.
If it had 25% unsolicited calls, it would be a bad way to communicate, and in the US it's more like 95%. You could cut the majority of spam calls and I'd still associate phone calls as mostly a waste of time.
Current law forces them to use known phone number ranges and to my surprise they respect it. I'm using an app that blocks those ranges, I receive about 3 unsolicited calls per day they're all blocked. We even have a phone provider that can block them for you.
I fear the ban will just make them use random numbers we can't block
The service that was managing this before (Bloctel) was just hacked https://frenchbreaches.com/alertes/bloctel-mshxaq0ysyd27ca7f...
I think this is an economic problem to solve, not a legal one.
The telephone, like postal mail, email, http and a myriad of other protocols suffers from a lack of transaction costs. Why is there so much junk postal mail? Because the post office has discounted rates for such mail.
Likewise, back when there were "long distance" tolls (nevermind the 10 cent SMS), there was less telemarketing because it was more expensive to operate call centers in each domain. I'm old enough to remember the sound of a phone ringing as evoking a happy "who could it be?" instead of "what scam is bothering me now?"
Granted, nobody is going to rewrite all the old protocols to bolt on a payment clearinghouse. And legislation is weak against a large pool of relatively minor miscreants since it requires expensive prosecutorial time to enforce, either directly in criminal law or indirectly by regulating major gateways' compliance activities.
To reduce unsolicited commercial contacts, people need to learn to accept expensive communication patterns. Currently we all already pay with the shadow work of curating contact lists, missing important calls because ringer off, deleting and marking as spam junk texts, etc. This shadow work could be reduced by accepting that a communique costs $X, with the knowledge that all the $X spent by others contacting oneself will offset one's own outbound costs.
Meanwhile, the US cut out a special exception to the do-no-call list for political text spam, leading to me personally for about a year getting about 10-15 text messages a day from Democratic scam PACs that have to be "unsubscribed" from individually, from each of hundreds or thousands of phone numbers. So an exception, and the exploitation of a loophole. They'll never stop punishing me for having donated to Bernie a decade ago.
Even worse, the PACs known to be scams where 98% of their proceeds just go to known, named party insiders. Even if I were a Democrat, they'd just have been preying on me and playing me for a fool.
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> After subtracting these massive operational costs—the payments to Mothership, the fees for texting services, the cost of digital ads and list rentals—the final sum delivered to candidates and committees is vanishingly small. My analysis of the network's FEC disbursements reveals that, at most, $11 million of the $678 million raised from individuals has made its way to candidates, campaigns, or the national party committees.
https://data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-mothership-vortex-...
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2024-08-02/spam-texts...
I had a bit of a funny situation happen where putting myself on the do not call list stopped calls from more reputable sources but also caused an even bigger increase in sketchy calls. I switched to using a free service tied to my phone company that makes callers enter a number before being forwarded. Turns out nearly 100% of these remaining calls were automated and got dropped. Turns out sometimes you need two fences to make good neighbors.
The only effective way to police this is to make the telco accountable and have a reporting system. Someone is terminating the calls and getting paid for doing it.
Automatic filtering on modern iOS has been a game changer here. Assume Android has something similar, but I can't speak highly enough of that one feature
Also
1785994091 | France is banning unsolicited telemarketing calls starting next week | https://apnews.com/article/france-unsolicited-telemarketing-... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49192829
1786426630 | France Bans Unsolicited Telemarketing Calls | https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/11/world/europe/france-ban-u... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49253772
You would think that of all the "great achievements" our current administration likes to boast about, they would put some serious TEETH into SPAM and telemarketing calls - - like prison time, and rabid enforcement. Everyone I know does not answer any live calls unless it's someone on their known "list", everything else is texting only. I discovered that when I respond to all unknown calls with "please text me", the spammers system won't take it and comes back with "error, invalid number" . . . then I know it's a scammer / spammer, and I block it.
But blocking them is useless because the next time they use that fake number to try to call you it comes up blocked by you, so now they know they have a live connected number, and that encourages them to hammer away at you.
I heard they get paid by how many numbers they dial out -- NOT by making a connection to a live human being.
The fact that the Gov't cannot effectively block all these calls shows how insecure our phone system really is.
A welcoming move.
I am from India and I use Truecaller premium to filter calls. It has become a big head-ache, making us to miss important calls
The main problem and challenge with all these regulations is enforcement. How are they actually going to enforce them?
The U.S. already has very strict rules against unsolicited calls, yet I still get around 20 spam calls a day saying things like "press 2 to be connected" or offering some "$64K loan."
At the same time, I have not received a single unsolicited call from a reputable company.
The same is true for text messages. In 2023, the U.S. introduced stricter regulations, and companies like Twilio responded with very strict anti-spam rules. The rules are now so restrictive that we are forced to stopped using Twilio for text important notification to our my own team.
Yet I still receive dozens of spam text messages every week.
So the question is whether the regulations can actually be enforced against the people who are already ignoring them.
As a young telecom engineer working in "Intelligent Networks" in the late 90's in the UK, I learnt that UK phones had a code that could be dialed during a call, so that the line could not hang up anymore.
That was geared against telemarketers or abusers, so that the callee could fetch a police officer that would acknowledge the fraudulent call.
Today all this data exists in databases. It would be so easy to check call logs from telemarketers to check if they ever called someone on a do-not-call list.
We already had a system in France which is phased out. The difference is that that previous system was opt-in, and now it i the duty of the telemarketers to get authorization.
The problem is that many of the calls come from abroad (and most will move there), so there is no easy way to enforce this requirement. It is only if someone files a complaint ... and the authorities track the number abroad ... and match it to a French provider ... that it will work.
Anyway it is better than nothing.
I stopped to reply to calls that I do not have in my contacts. If it is important someone will leave a message or send an SMS/WhatsApp
Note that in France, telemarketing calls are already required to use specific number prefixes. This is already very useful: you can immediately tell whether a call is from a telemarketer just by looking at the number prefix.
I hope they can make it work
We have a ban on telemarketing calls regarding insurance in Switzerland. But we still get them.
So what happens is that insurance agents (which are required to be licensed) don't call them selves. Instead they use 3rd party call centers outside the country which make the calls. They "warmup" the clients to get a meeting in which the agent then in a visit can make the sale.
For law enforcement to punish these people and revoke their licenses they would need to do costly sting operation which they can only do so much.
Here's what has worked for me (in the US), after feeling helpless for so long: Call Screening.
I had no idea this existed on iOS (there may be an equivalent on Android), and I was very skeptical about it, but it has turned spam calls into a non-issue for me.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/screen-and-block-call...
It’s crazy the amount of phone operator companies sell our data and numbers to those people. I really wish it would stop because scammers can also use it. So frustrating.
I reckon that the best way to stop spam calls (and messages) is to start charging for them again. No more flat rates.
The scheme that I have in mind is to charge a small amount to the caller and give it to the recipient. I reckon that the balance between groups of friends or family would be zero.
Companies surely could pay this money but spammers won't be able to explore a whole list of numbers to try to fish a victim.
At least most of the Spanish one can be banned by blocklisting a whole company. which is what I did following a guide I found, and have reduced my Spam calls from 2 per day, to 3 per year.
However, the only way to solve this I believe is that you could once you get an unsolicited call to press a combination like ##01, and automatically this is passed to an agency that deals to punish whoever is behind the call in real time. At least if they call from a national number.