CTIA, T-Mobile, TextNow, Pinger, and other influential commenters reinforce CACC’s call for risk-based, privacy-preserving regulation focused on actual sources of illegal traffic
The CommLaw Group filed Reply Comments on behalf of the Consumer Access & Choice Coalition in the Federal Communications Commission’s proceeding examining whether to impose expanded Know-Your-Customer requirements on originating voice service providers.
CACC supports the FCC’s objective. Providers that knowingly or recklessly facilitate illegal robocalls, spoofing, impersonation scams, and other unlawful traffic should be identified, isolated, and removed from the communications ecosystem.
But effective regulation requires more than a worthy objective. It requires rules that are targeted, workable, proportionate, and likely to address the conduct causing the harm.
As CACC explained in its Reply Comments, the Commission should not turn access to ordinary communications services into a bank-style identity checkpoint. Its guiding principle is straightforward: Regulate abusive origination behavior—not ordinary consumer anonymity.
CACC represents small, nomadic VoIP, second-line application-based VoIP, wireless, prepaid, freemium, and other consumer-focused providers. These companies serve individual consumers and small businesses, including users who rely on affordable or secondary telephone numbers for privacy, personal safety, gig work, marketplace transactions, temporary communications, or separation of their professional and personal lives.
The Record Strongly Supports CACC’s Position
The initial comment record brought together nearly every relevant perspective: national network operators, competitive VoIP and CPaaS providers, consumer calling applications, rural and small-provider associations, privacy and civil-liberties organizations, domestic-violence survivor advocates, identity-verification vendors, financial institutions, state regulators, and specialized communications providers.
Read fairly, that record does not support imposing the same documentary identity requirements on every person who seeks access to voice service. It supports a framework that is risk-based, behavior-driven, privacy-preserving, vendor-neutral, and proportionate. Even commenters favoring stronger verification generally focused their proposals on business, enterprise, bulk, branded-calling, automated, or high-volume origination—not ordinary consumers obtaining a low-volume personal line.
That consensus became even clearer in the reply round.
CTIA expressly relied on CACC’s comments in opposing costly consumer-facing identity mandates, supporting an RMD-integrated safe harbor, rejecting mandatory third-party verification vendors, and documenting the disproportionate impact of per-transaction verification costs on prepaid, freemium, app-based, and low-margin consumer services.
T-Mobile likewise cited CACC in support of preserving flexibility for low-risk consumer accounts, avoiding unnecessary privacy and data-security risks, focusing enforcement on bad actors, and rejecting strict-liability treatment where providers employ reasonable, risk-based compliance programs.
Consumer-oriented second-line and prepaid calling providers also reinforced CACC’s central themes. TextNow and Pinger repeatedly relied on CACC’s positions concerning consumer privacy, behavioral risk triggers, platform-level aggregation, vendor neutrality, proportionate enforcement, and protection of low-cost application-based services. Their filings explain why account, device, network, traffic, and behavioral signals often provide better indicators of actual risk than front-end collection of government identification from every user.
Other influential commenters—including USTelecom, WISPA, and the Cloud Communications Alliance—also cited CACC favorably in support of a flexible safe harbor, data minimization, and protection against mandatory vendor-controlled verification regimes.
Notably, our review of the reply record identified no filing that criticized CACC, disputed its factual premises, or directly rebutted its proposed framework. The record reflects substantial agreement with CACC’s core message—even among parties approaching the proceeding from very different business, consumer-protection, and policy perspectives.
What CACC Is Asking the FCC to Do
CACC is not asking the Commission to abandon KYC. It is asking the Commission to distinguish effective KYC from indiscriminate KYC.
The Coalition urges the FCC to:
- Preserve low-friction access for ordinary, low-volume consumer users while using objective behavioral signals to identify elevated-risk accounts.
- Apply formal Know-Your-Business requirements to commercial, enterprise, high-volume, automated, reseller, SIM-box, lead-generation, branded-calling, and bulk-origination use cases.
- Measure “high volume” and “high risk” at the customer, account, campaign, entity, provisioning, device-cluster, or traffic-pattern level—not by aggregating millions of unrelated users across an entire platform.
- Emphasize continuous Know-Your-Traffic monitoring, traceback responsiveness, anomaly detection, rate limits, device intelligence, and rapid mitigation.
- Adopt a performance-based, vendor-neutral safe harbor integrated into existing Robocall Mitigation Plan and Robocall Mitigation Database processes.
- Reject mandatory raw government-ID retention for ordinary consumers, strict $2,500-per-call forfeitures against good-faith providers, and unbounded downstream blocking based on perceived KYC deficiencies.
This approach strengthens accountability where the risk is real without treating every consumer as a presumptive fraudster.
Effective Regulation—Not Regulatory Theater
Too often, government responds to a difficult problem by layering new paperwork, data collection, certifications, vendors, audits, and penalties onto the companies already trying to comply.
Those measures may create the appearance of action. But regulatory theater is not consumer protection.
A universal identity mandate would impose new technology, staffing, vendor, cybersecurity, storage, privacy, customer-service, and dispute-resolution costs across the industry. Those costs do not disappear. They are passed through in higher consumer prices, absorbed through reduced investment, or avoided by eliminating free and low-cost offerings altogether.
The likely result is fewer competitors, fewer choices, less privacy, less consumer freedom, and greater concentration in the hands of companies large enough to absorb the regulatory burden. Meanwhile, sophisticated bad actors will continue using stolen credentials, synthetic identities, shell companies, identity mules, offshore gateways, compromised accounts, SIM boxes, and other evasive methods.
Throwing spaghetti at the wall is not a strategy.
CACC supports rules that demonstrably improve traceability, facilitate traceback, expose abnormal traffic, require rapid mitigation, and remove providers that knowingly or recklessly enable illegal calling. But the Commission should be able to explain how each new requirement will materially reduce unlawful traffic—and why its benefits justify the costs and collateral consequences imposed on lawful providers and consumers.
Join and Support CACC
The KYC proceeding is part of a broader regulatory trend. Consumer-focused providers increasingly face proposals that may sound reasonable in isolation but collectively threaten affordability, competition, innovation, privacy, and continued access to low-cost communications services.
Small and mid-sized providers cannot afford to remain silent while policies affecting their survival are shaped principally by large incumbents, well-funded enterprise interests, and vendors seeking government-mandated roles in the compliance ecosystem.
CACC gives consumer-focused providers a practical way to share advocacy costs, contribute operational expertise, and present a stronger collective voice before the FCC and other policymakers. Participation may also be structured to protect member anonymity where appropriate.
Providers offering second-line applications, prepaid or freemium calling, nomadic VoIP, app-based communications, privacy-oriented services, reseller offerings, or other innovative consumer communications solutions are encouraged to join and support CACC’s work.
To learn more, contact:
Jonathan S. Marashlian
Managing Partner, The CommLaw Group, PLLC
Counsel to the Consumer Access & Choice Coalition
jsm@commlawgroup.com
703-714-1313