Part of it is that their are legitimate reasons to spoof CallerID such as when a company wants to set all outgoing calls to show the main company name and number, even when the call originates from a direct inbound dial line. Carriers could block calls from numbers that supposedly don't exist or dial out--and I believe some are starting to offer than as a service. But if they spoof as a real number, that won't work.
I suspect a higher-level issue is that illegal junk calls fall into the mild annoyance category for most people. If the average person was getting a hundred calls a day to the point where they couldn't use their phone service, something would happen.
>"If the average person was getting a hundred calls a day to the point where they couldn't use their phone service, something would happen."
This does seem to be the endgame. The last excuse I heard was "what if a friend of a friend wants to invite you to her party so she gets your number from the shared friend, and she also does the same for a bunch of other friends of friends?"
Do you ever wonder if Zuck has some kind of ghost profile for you anyway? This person that shows up in photos but has no profile...he probably knows your name and where you fit in the social graph.
He probably has numerous ghosts of me. I know that every time anything gets updated about a small business (phone number, address, principals, etc.) FB spins up a new ghost page for that business. They're not only bad at finding dupes, they're also bad at removing dupes once they've been notified of them.
It's not. The PSTN isn't one giant cohesive system. It's a federation of lots of companies in lots of countries. Getting such a system in place requires filtering between carriers as well as everyone filtering what subscribers can do. You may have heard: not every country in the world likes every other country, and not every telephony carrier business likes every other telephony carrier business.
I suspect a higher-level issue is that illegal junk calls fall into the mild annoyance category for most people. If the average person was getting a hundred calls a day to the point where they couldn't use their phone service, something would happen.