Enhancing Know-Your-Customer Requirements
Key claim: The FCC proposes to strengthen Know-Your-Customer requirements for voice service providers by mandating more rigorous customer identification and verification, imposing additional obligations on high-volume customers, and assessing penalties for violations on a per-call basis to combat illegal robocalls.
Abstract
(Proposed Rule · Federal Communications Commission) In this document, the Federal Communications Commission (Commission) proposes actions to provide additional clarity to fill the gap between its current Know Your Customer (KYC) requirement and the types of rigorous KYC steps necessary to protect consumers. Specifically, the Commission seeks comment on customer identification requirements for new and renewing customers, requirements for verifying, retaining, and re-verifying customer information, requiring more information from certain customers such as high-volume customers, and on how these efforts can complement call branding and caller name requirements the Commission may adopt. The Commission also proposes to assess penalties for violations of the KYC requirement on a per call basis. With this inquiry, the Commission aims to make it more difficult for scammers to originate illegal calls and easier to enforce against them when they do get onto the network.
Why this matters
KYC rules shift part of the anti-robocall burden from post-hoc enforcement onto the carriers that originate traffic, potentially raising onboarding friction and costs for legitimate high-volume callers while giving the FCC per-call penalty leverage against noncompliant providers. For consumers, stronger provider-side vetting is aimed at reducing the volume of illegal robocalls that reach their phones.