Remember listening to the radio? Sure you do. I, in fact, get much of my news there since I haven't thrown together an HDTV antenna yet. But that's another story. I use the internet mostly for YouTube... Anyway, at this writing the latest and record-setting (a few weeks) government shutdown has just ended for a planned 3-week hiatus to get paychecks through to various agencies. A radio news story I heard a few days before the agreement worried that since the government services that maintain "do-not-call" registries would not be open for business, robocalls would be worse during the shutdown's duration.
If only journalists would look stuff up.
["Buuuuuut nooooooooooooooooooo..." - noted philosopher John Belushi]
It is beyond the scope of this post to note all the ways that telemarketers have gotten around the "do-not-call" registries, but it's worth noting that there's a different issue with the recent spate of robotic sales calls, many in languages other than the one you speak. They're coming through land lines, landline equivalent arrangements, cell phones and anything else that uses a telephone number. The operative concept here is "telephone", which predates the "smart" phone by quite a bit. Back in olden times, specifically the middle Leisure Suit era, there appeared a communications method called SS7, which did not anticipate computer control of phone switching networks. Actually that wasn't the problem. The problem only a few years back was that the standards committee folk that maintained SS7 in current times couldn't agree as to how to fix certain flaws...
Wikipedia's article on SS7
(This is not an endorsement of any online encyclopedia using lightly-vetted update arrangements; it was a better-than-average article at the time of this writing at least.)
So until a fix for the vulnerabilities/features of SS7 is produced, the robocall outbreak will continue regardless of the presence or absence of do-not-call lists, which address a different problem anyway.
