The 1980s are calling. They want their telephone network back.

[Commentary] No one likes unsolicited commercial phone calls. It doesn’t matter much whether they are automated calls with prerecorded messages or merely calls from unrecognized numbers or whether they come during dinner or in the middle of the work day. If you are like most people nowadays, you screen all calls, never answering the phone except for numbers you recognize or when you are expecting a call.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been actively working to rein in this scourge, revising its implementation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) in 2015 and working to address problems relating to robocalls with an ongoing rulemaking. These efforts are largely laudable – but they are also too limited. In particular, they place too much emphasis on those making these calls and too little on how the architecture of the phone network makes these calls possible. As a result, they simultaneously are only incomplete solutions to stopping the problem of “bad calls” and also unduly burden “good calls,” subjecting companies with legitimate need to call consumers that want to play by the rules in making those calls to substantial liability for simple and honest mistakes. A better approach would be to update the telephone network from its current 1980s protocols to give consumers greater control over who can call them.

[Gus Hurwitz is an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska College of Law]