Should I take the initiative to take responsibility for harassing the telephone operator?

Recently, thirteen departments, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate, issued the "Special Action Plan for Comprehensive Remediation of Distressed Phones". The plan points out that at present, problems such as disturbing people by marketing calls and malicious calls are increasingly prominent, which seriously affect people's normal lives. It is now decided to launch a nationwide special campaign to comprehensively rectify harassing calls from July 20 18 to the end of February 20 19.

This time, a special rectification of harassing calls was carried out separately, but harassing text messages were not included, because it was relatively difficult to control harassing calls. Technically speaking, it is not difficult to identify spam messages by words, and they can be filtered in the process of sending, so the "Regulations on the Management of Communication Short Message Service" was issued three years ago. However, harassing calls involves speech recognition, and the technical difficulty is much higher. Moreover, many callers who harass the phone are often selling services, so it is difficult to clearly distinguish harassment from sales promotion.

Therefore, this special rectification campaign involves a wide range of departments. For example, many people have a headache selling houses, renting houses and harassing calls. The Plan requires the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development to take the lead, strengthen the supervision and management of real estate development enterprises, real estate brokerage agencies and real estate brokers, strictly implement the filing system of intermediary agencies, and strictly regulate telemarketing behavior. In addition, finance, medical care and tourism. There are also requirements for the corresponding departments to cooperate, and these governance are aimed at the source, that is, the caller.

But whether individuals or enterprises, marketing or malicious harassment, operators are ultimately intermediaries, using the communication services they provide. Therefore, in the source governance, operators are also the biggest responsibility.

In the governance of spam messages, the three major operators have been repeatedly found by the media to make profits by using spam messages, and this laissez-faire attitude has been repeatedly criticized. So is harassing phone calls. For example, CCTV Finance "Economic Half-hour" reported earlier that for group call harassing calls, operators can judge whether it is harassment according to how many numbers are called out in one minute. It is not difficult to supervise and shut down, but there is a chain of interests behind group calls, harassing telephone operators to earn 5 or 6 cents per minute.

It is precisely considering the importance of the role of operators and the possible interference of harassing telephone interest chains to operators. The "Proposal" puts strict control of harassing phone channels in the first place, requiring telecom enterprises to "who is responsible for access". In other words, operators should strictly examine user qualifications. For example, in the number section of "95, 96, 400" which is the hardest hit area, if the threshold for approval and issuance is deliberately lowered to open the door for harassing enterprises, or if there is insufficient disciplinary effect on individuals and enterprise users who make harassing calls, then operators will bear the responsibility in the subsequent special rectification.

Operators are also using their own interests to control spam messages and harassing calls. It is not surprising that the motivation is insufficient. Therefore, in the past, there were many sports-based governance, but they often encountered a rebound after governance. Last month, there was even a case where operators didn't block spam messages, but black people. Therefore, it is necessary to further strengthen the responsibility of operators.

The joint rectification of thirteen departments lasted for one and a half years, which is quite rare in the development history of the communication industry. On the one hand, it reflects the determination of thorough rectification, on the other hand, it also reflects the difficulty of governance. However, in order to achieve long-term governance, in addition to special actions, a set of supporting mechanisms is needed to clarify the responsibilities of all parties including operators and callers in harassing calls, as well as corresponding punishment measures, and at the same time empower users and improve reporting channels.

The management of harassing calls should also be placed under the framework of user privacy protection. Like today, many apps need to fill in the phone number for registration and use, which has become an important source of information leakage. For example, if you register on the rental website, there may be a real estate agent's phone number soon. With the comprehensive internet of food, clothing, housing and transportation, personal privacy protection should be mentioned in a higher governance order. By regulating the storage and use of personal information by internet companies, the situation of harassing calls is curbed.