States, Industry Take on Robocalls.

• Author: Morton, Heather
• Position: TELECOMMUNICATIONS

Your phone rings. You don't recognize the number but you pick up anyway. Sure enough, you hear a recorded message instead of a live person.

Hello, robocall.

The average person gets about 15 such calls a month. Nearly 5 billion of these so-called unsolicited commercial communications were made in July 2019 alone, the YouMail Robocall Index estimates.

In August, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and nine other telecommunications companies joined the attorneys general of all 50 states plus the District of Columbia to announce a new pact to eliminate illegal robocalls.

Their agreement, which is set out in a list of anti-robocall principles, includes call-blocking technology that will be merged into the phone networks' existing infrastructure, at no charge to customers. The technology, known in the industry...