[codeplea]

>what's the moral justification for making this illegal?

The robocalls I receive are all using fake caller IDs. At that point, it's fraud, isn't it?

I wouldn't mind robocallers if they used a real caller ID. If that were the case, I could just block them and be done with it.

[smabie]

Misrepresentation is a commonly agreed upon morally bad thing (i.e lying). But spoofing is an issue seperate and apart from robo-calls, even if the correlation between the two is very high. So we still need to figure out what, exactly, is morally bad about being robo-called. And the answer can’t be related to spoofing, do not call lists, or whatever, as these are not related to the essence of what defines a unsolicited robo-call.

[dredmorbius]

Small-scale spoofing, a/k/a pseudonymous / anonymous whistleblowing or commentary, can be useful, and has a very well-established tradition.

The goal of, effectively, all robocalls is fraud or value-extraction from the system. It works only because of the scale possible.

Small-scale operators (unless hugely and widely distributed) don't exhibit these characteristics. A fundamental problem of robocalls is the scale of operation itself.

Scale matters.

Countermeasures which disrupt at-scale operation whilst protecting small-scale activities are net beneficial.

[erik_seaberg]

Tragedy of the commons. Unwanted bulk requests that intentionally evade automated filters are an attack on the availability of a communication network.