Five FCC cards telling consumers to switch on filtering their carriers already shipped

The FCC released five one-page robocall blocking guides on 22 September — Android and iPhone at the device level, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon at the provider level. The news release came from the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau. The instruction is to use both cards that apply: “follow the steps in both the guide for your device and for your phone company.”

Everything the cards describe already exists. The device cards walk through built-in OS settings — blocking unknown numbers, filtering spam calls and texts, controlling who can make contact. The carrier cards cover Scam Shield, Call Filter, and the free reporting paths each of the three offers. The release makes a point of noting that many of the features cost nothing extra or are already included in the customer’s plan. There is no docket, no comment deadline, and no rulemaking attached; this is consumer education, via Light Reading, which reprinted the release the same day.

The release also points at the Robocall Scorecard Public Notice, which proposes rating voice providers and takes comment. The two documents put the work in different places: the guides ask the subscriber to turn filtering on, the scorecard proposes to score the providers — and, as drafted, to score only the ones at the end of the call path.

The guides ask nothing of a provider.