Last December I wrote a feature for The Verge exploring the FCC’s long overdue effort to stop race and class discrimination in broadband deployment. For decades, big telecoms have not only refused to evenly upgrade broadband in low income and poor areas (despite billions in subsidies for this exact purpose), they’ve provably charged poor and minority neighborhoods significantly more money for worse service.

To be clear the FCC’s plan doesn’t actually stop such discrimination. Regulators didn’t even have the moral courage to call out big telecoms with a history of such practices (see: AT&T’s “digital redlining” in cities like Cleveland and Detroit). The FCC simply acknowledged that this discrimination clearly exists and imposed some loophole-filled rules stating that big ISPs shouldn’t discriminate moving forward.

As with the FCC’s restored net neutrality rules, I highly suspect the historically feckless and captured FCC ever actually enforces the guidelines with any zeal. But the effort to acknowledge that such discrimination exists (as it has been documented in both electrical utility deployments and highway location selection) was viewed as progress by civil rights groups. And also enough to send the GOP into a multi-month tizzy.

Last February, 65 US House Republications submitted a resolution of disapproval claiming, falsely, that the Biden administration was using the pretense of “equity” to “expand the federal government’s control of all Internet services and infrastructure.” And last week, the Federalist Society hosted a function at which GOP officials (including Trump appointed FCC Commission Nathan Simington) gathered to make up claims the rules were already having a “chilling effect across the broadband industry“:

“Out of fear of running afoul of the rules, companies will certainly avoid otherwise planned investments,” said Erin Boone, chief of staff and wireless advisor for Republican FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington.”

As you might recall, this was the same claim Republicans made about some modest net neutrality rules. For a decade the GOP proclaimed that modest and largely unenforced FCC net neutrality rules would have a devastating impact on broadband investment. But if you looked at earnings reports, public data, and even CEO statements, it was patently obvious the claim was absolute bullshit.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is also positively flummoxed that a telecom regulator acknowledged that digital broadband discrimination exists, penning a lengthy missive falsely stating that the FCC’s half-assed effort would most assuredly harm poor Americans:

“These rules undermine public and private sector efforts to build modern broadband networks—jeopardizing connectivity for all Americans.”

This is the perpetual doom cycle U.S. telecom policy has inhabited for 30 odd years.

Democrats weakly propose long overdue but meekly enforced rules to address a problem they’ve ignored for the better part of thirty years. Republicans pop up to proclaim these bare-minimum efforts are somehow a “radical socialist takeover of the internet” (or some variant), which “both sides” news outlets parrot without much in the way of skepticism, giving the GOP unearned credibility on telecom policy.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s broadband privacy, net neutrality, racial discrimination, or even very basic efforts to stop your cable company from ripping you off with bullshit fees. It doesn’t matter how basic the proposal is or if it ever even sees enforcement.

The pretense is always the same: that the government doing the absolute bare minimum is, in reality, a “radical government running amok” and “chilling all investment in the broadband industry.”

It makes me wonder how the AT&T earlobe-nibbling politicians of today would respond to a Democratic party and regulators with an actual antitrust enforcement backbone. In lock step with GOP whining, major telecom policy and lobbying groups have also sued to block the modest digital discrimination rules in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in St. Louis, claiming falsely it’s akin to “rate regulation.”

The goal of most Republicans (and a not insubstantial number of Democrats) is a market in which regional, highly consolidated monopolies like AT&T and Comcast are allowed to freely run amok, taking bottomless advantage of the one-two punch of feckless oversight and limited competition while being slathered with subsidies. All dressed up as some kind of noble defense of free markets and the little guy.

I’ve been seeing some variation of this for the better part of 25 years of covering the broadband industry, and it’s utterly remarkable how utterly impervious the whole corruption-fueled dynamic is to both reason and meaningful change.

Late last year MINISFORUM introduced a small workstation-class computer called the MINISFORUM MS-01 featuring support for up to an Intel Core i9-13900H processor, a PCIe x16 slot for a half-height graphics card, and support for 10 GbE and 2.5GbE wired network connections. It’s currently available for $399 and up. Now it looks like MINISFORUM has a […]

The post MINISFORUM MS-A1 is a small desktop PC with up to AMD Ryzen 7 8700G, OCuLink and 2.5 GbE LAN appeared first on Liliputing.

Aging satellite TV provider Dish Network is supposed to be undergoing a major transformation from tired old satellite TV provider to streaming and wireless juggernaut. It was a cornerstone of a Trump administration FCC and DOJ plan to cobble together a new wireless carrier out of twine and vibes as a counter-balance to the competition-eroding T-Mobile and Sprint merger.

It’s… not going well. All of the problems critics of the T-Mobile and Sprint merger predicted (layoffs, price hikes, lest robust competition) have come true. Meanwhile Dish has been bleeding satellite TV, wireless, and streaming TV subscribers for a while (last quarter the company lost another 314,000 TV subscribers, including 249,000 satellite TV subs and 65,000 Sling TV customers).

Dish’s new 5G network has also generally been received as a sort of half-hearted joke. Dish also lost 123,000 prepaid wireless subscribers last quarter; it can’t pay its debt obligations, can’t afford to buy the spectrum it was supposed to acquire as part of the Sprint/T-Mobile merger arrangement; and expanding its half-cooked 5G network looks tenuous at best.

Last year Dish proposed merging with Echostar in a bid to distract everybody from the company’s ongoing mess. They’ve also tried to goose stock valuations by hinting at an equally doomed merger with DirecTV. But those distractions didn’t help either, and there are increasing worries among belatedly aware analysts that this all ends with bankruptcy and a pile of rubble:

“MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett offered a blunt assessment of the company’s future based on Dish’s deteriorating pay-TV and mobile subscriber customer base: “Dish’s business is spiraling towards bankruptcy. Gradually, then all at once, the declines are gathering speed,” he wrote in a research note.”

From 2019 or so I noted that this whole mess was likely a doomed effort, primarily designed to provide cover for an anti-competitive, job-killing wireless merger. It always seemed likely to me that Dish (which had never built a wireless network) would string FCC regulators along for a few years before selling off its valuable spectrum assets and whatever half-assed 5G network it had managed to construct.

Despite this, trade magazines that cover the telecom industry tried desperately to pretend this was all a very serious adult venture, despite zero indication anyone involved had any idea what they were doing. And the deal rubber stamping and circular logic used to justify it ran in very stark contrast to the ongoing pretense that we supposedly care about “antitrust reform.”

Ultimately Dish will make a killing on spectrum, the FCC will fine them a relative pittance for failing to meet the flimsy build requirements affixed to the merger conditions, and Dish CEO Charlie Ergen will trot off into the sunset on a giant pile of money. Some giant player like Verizon will then swoop in to gobble up what’s left of the wreckage, and the industry will consolidate further (the whole point)

The regulatory impact of approving Sprint/T-Mobile, which consolidated the U.S. wireless market from four to three major providers (jacking up prices and killing off thousands of jobs), will be forgotten, and the regulators and officials behind the entire mess will have long ago moved on to other terrible, short-sighted ideas.

By Adam Kovac, Karen Heyman, and Liz Allan.

India approved the construction of two fabs and a packaging house, for a total investment of about $15.2 billion, according to multiple sources. One fab will be jointly owned by Tata and Taiwan’s Powerchip. The second fab will be a joint investment between CG Power, Japan’s Renesas Electronics, and Thailand’s Stars Microelectronics. Tata will run the packaging facility, as well. India expects these efforts will add 20,000 advanced technology jobs and 60,000 indirect jobs, according to the Times of India. The country has been talking about building a fab for at least the past couple of decades, but funding never materialized.

The U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) issued a CHIPS Act-based Notice of Funding Opportunity for R&D to establish and accelerate domestic capacity for advanced packaging substrates and substrate materials. The U.S. Secretary of Commerce said the government is prioritizing CHIPS Act funding for projects that will be operational by 2030 and anticipates America will produce 20% of the world’s leading-edge logic chips by the end of the decade.

The top three foundries plan to implement backside power delivery as soon as the 2nm node, setting the stage for faster and more efficient switching in chips, reduced routing congestion, and lower noise across multiple metal layers. But this novel approach to optimizing logic performance depends on advances in lithography, etching, polishing, and bonding processes.

Intel spun out Altera as a standalone FPGA company, the culmination of a rebranding and reorganization of its former Programmable Solutions Group. The move follows Intel’s decision to keep Intel Foundry at arm’s length, with a clean line between the foundry and the company’s processor business.

Multiple new hardware micro-architecture vulnerabilities were published in the latest Common Weakness Enumeration release this week, all related to transient execution (CWE 1420-1423).

The U.S. Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) published a technical report calling for the adoption of memory safe programming languages, aiming to reduce the attack surface in cyberspace and anticipate systemic security risk with better diagnostics. The DoC also is seeking information ahead of an inquiry into Chinese-made connected vehicles “to understand the extent of the technology in these cars that can capture wide swaths of data or remotely disable or manipulate connected vehicles.”

Quick links to more news:

Design and Power
Manufacturing and Test
Automotive
Security
Pervasive Computing and AI
Events

Design and Power

Micron began mass production of a new high-bandwidth chip for AI. The company said the HBM3E will be a key component in NVIDIA’s H2000 Tensor Core GPUs, set to begin shipping in the second quarter of 2024. HBM is a key component of 2.5D advanced packages.

Samsung developed a 36GB HBM3E 12H DRAM, saying it sets new records for bandwidth. The company achieved this by using advanced thermal compression non-conductive film, which allowed it to cram 12 layers into the area normally taken up by 8. This is a novel way of increasing DRAM density.

Keysight introduced QuantumPro, a design and simulation tool, plus workflow, for quantum computers. It combines five functionalities into the Advanced Design System (ADS) 2024 platform. Keysight also introduced its AI Data Center Test Platform, which includes pre-packaged benchmarking apps and dataset analysis tools.

Synopsys announced a 1.6T Ethernet IP solution, including 1.6T MAC and PCS Ethernet controllers, 224G Ethernet PHY IP, and verification IP.

Tenstorrent, Japan’s Leading-Edge Semiconductor Technology Center (LSTC) , and Rapidus are co-designing AI chips. LSTC will use Tenstorrent’s RISC-V and Chiplet IP for its forthcoming edge 2nm AI accelerator.

This week’s Systems and Design newsletter features these top stories:

• 2.5D Integration: Big Chip Or Small PCB: Defining whether a 5D device is a PCB shrunk to fit into a package or a chip that extends beyond the limits of a single die can have significant design consequences.
• Commercial Chiplets: Challenges of establishing a commercial chiplet.
• Accellera Preps New Standard For Clock-Domain Crossing: New standard aims to streamline the clock-domain crossing flow.
• Thinking Big: From Chips To Systems: Aart de Geus discusses the shift from chips to systems, next-generation transistors, and what’s required to build multi-die devices.
• Integration challenges for RISC-V: Modifying the source code allows for democratization of design, but it adds some hurdles for design teams (video).

Demand for high-end AI servers is driven by four American companies, which will account for 60% of global demand in 2024, according to Trendforce. NVIDIA is projected to continue leading the market, with AMD closing the gap due its lower cost model.

The EU consortium PREVAIL is accepting design proposals as it seeks to develop next-gen edge-AI technologies. Anchors include CEA-Leti, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, imec, and VTT, which will use their 300mm fabrication, design, and test facilities to validate prototypes.

Siemens joined an initiative to expand educational opportunities in the semiconductor space around the world. The Semiconductor Education Alliance was launched by Arm in 2023 and focuses on helping teach skills in IC design and EDA.

Q-CTRL announced partnerships with six firms that it says will expand access to its performance-management software and quantum technologies. Wolfram, Aqarios, and qBraid will integrate Q-CTRL’s Fire Opal technology into their products, while Qblox, Keysight, and Quantware will utilize Q-CTRL’s Boulder Opal hardware system.

NTT, Red Hat, NVIDIA, and Fujitsu teamed up to provide data pipeline acceleration and contain orchestration technologies targeted at real-time AI analysis of massive data sets at the edge.

Manufacturing and Test

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Office of Electricity launched the American-Made Silicon Carbide (SiC)  Packaging Prize. This $2.25 million contest invites competitors to propose, design, build, and test state-of-the-art SiC semiconductor packaging prototypes.

Applied Materials introduced products and solutions for patterning issues in the “angstrom era,” including line edge roughness, tip-to-tip spacing limitations, bridge defects, and edge placement errors.

imec reported progress made in EUV processes, masks and metrology in preparation for high-NA EUV. It also identified advanced node lithography and etch related processes that contribute the most to direct emissions of CO2, along with proposed solutions.

proteanTecs will participate in the Arm Total Design ecosystem, which now includes more than 20 companies united around a charter to accelerate and simplify the development of custom SoCs based on Arm Neoverse compute subsystems.

NikkeiAsia took an in-depth look at Japan’s semiconductor ecosystem and concluded it is ripe for revival with investments from TSMC, Samsung, and Micron, among others. TrendForce came to a similar conclusion, pointing to the fast pace of Japan’s resurgence, including the opening of TSMC’s fab.

‍FormFactor closed its sale of its Suzhou and Shanghai companies to Grand Junction Semiconductor for $25M in cash.

The eBeam Initiative celebrated its 15th anniversary and welcomed a new member, FUJIFILM. The group also uncorked its fourth survey of its members technology using deep learning in the photomask-to-wafer manufacturing flow.

Automotive

Apple shuttered its electric car project after 10 years of development. The chaotic effort cost the company billions of dollars, according to The New York Times.

Infineon released new automotive programmable SoCs with fifth-gen human machine interface (HMI) technology, offering improved sensitivity in three packages. The MCU offers up to 84 GPIOs and 384 KB of flash memory. The company also released automotive and industrial-grade 750V G1 discrete SiC MOSFETs aimed at applications such as EV charging, onboard chargers, DC-DC converters, energy, solid state circuit breakers, and data centers.

Cadence expanded its Tensilica IP portfolio to boost computation for automotive sensor fusion applications. Vision, radar, lidar, and AI processing are combined in a single DSP for multi-modal, sensor-based system designs.

Ansys will continue translating fast computing into fast cars, as the company’s partnership with Oracle Red Bull Racing was renewed. The Formula 1 team uses Ansys technology to improve car aerodynamics and ensure the safety of its vehicles.

Lazer Sport adopted Siemens’ Xcelerator portfolio to connect 3D design with 3D printing for prototyping and digital simulation of its sustainable KinetiCore cycling helmet.

The chair of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) suggested automakers that sell internet-connected cars should be subject to a telecommunications law aiming to protect domestic violence survivors, reports CNBC. This is due to emerging cases of stalking through vehicle location tracking technology and remote control of functions like locking doors or honking the horn.

BYD‘s CEO said the company does not plan to enter the U.S. market because it is complicated and electrification has slowed down, reports Yahoo Finance. Meanwhile, the first shipment of BYD vehicles arrived in Europe, according to DW News.

Ascent Solar Technologies’ solar module products will fly on NASA’s upcoming Lightweight Integrated Solar Array and AnTenna (LISA-T) mission.

Security

Researchers at Texas A&M University and the University of Delaware proposed the first red-team attack on graph neural network (GNN)-based techniques in hardware security.

A panel of four experts discuss mounting concerns over quantum security, auto architectures, and supply chain resiliency.

Synopsys released its ninth annual Open Source Security and Risk Analysis report, finding that 74% of code bases contained high-risk open-source vulnerabilities, up 54% since last year.

President Biden issued an executive order to prevent the large-scale transfer of Americans’ personal data to countries of concern. Types of data include genomic, biometric, personal health, geolocation, financial, and other personally identifiable information, which bad actors can use to track and scam Americans.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 to provide a comprehensive view for managing cybersecurity risk.

The EU Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) published a study on best practices for cyber crisis management, saying the geopolitical situation continues to impact the cyber threat landscape and planning for threats and incidents is vital for crisis management.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $45 million to protect the energy sector from cyberattacks.

The National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and others published an advisory on Russian cyber actors using compromised routers.  Also the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), and partners advised of tactics used by Russian Foreign Intelligence Service cyber actors to gain initial access into a cloud environment.

CISA, the FBI, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) updated an advisory concerning the ALPHV Blackcat ransomware as a service (RaaS), which primarily targets the healthcare sector.

CISA also published a guide to support university cybersecurity clinics and issued other alerts.

Pervasive Computing and AI

Renesas expanded its RZ family of MPUs with a single-chip AI accelerator that offers 10 TOPS per watt power efficiency and delivers AI inference performance of up to 80 TOPS without a cooling fan. The chip is aimed at next-gen robotics with vision AI and real-time control.

Infineon launched dual-phase power modules to help data centers meet the power demands of AI GPU platforms. The company also released a family of solid-state isolators to deliver faster switching with up to 70% lower power dissipation.

Fig. 1: Infineon’s dual phase power modules: Source: Infineon

Amber Semiconductor announced a reference design for brushless motor applications using its AC to DC conversion semiconductor system to power ST‘s STM32 MCUs.

Micron released its universal flash storage (UFS) 4.0 package at just 9×13 mm, built on 232-layer 3D NAND and offering up to 1 terabyte capacity to enable next-gen phone designs and larger batteries.

LG and Meta teamed up to develop extended reality (XR) products, content, services, and platforms within the virtual space.

Microsoft and Mistral AI partnered to accelerate AI innovation and to develop and deploy Mistral’s next-gen large language models (LLMs).

Microsoft’s vice chair and president announced the company’s AI access principles, governing how it will operate AI datacenter infrastructure and other AI assets around the world.

Singtel and VMware partnered to enable enterprises to manage their connectivity and cloud infrastructure through the Singtel Paragon platform for 5G and edge cloud.

Keysight was selected as the Test Partner for the Deutsche Telekom Satellite NB-IoT Early Adopter Program, providing an end-to-end NB-IoT NTN testbed that allows designers and developers to validate reference designs for solutions using 3GPP Release 17 (Rel-17) NTN standards.

Global server shipments are predicted to increase by 2.05% in 2024, with AI servers accounting for about 12%, reports TrendForce. Also, the smartphone camera lens market is expected to rebound in 2024 with 3.8% growth driven by AI-smartphones, to reach about 4.22 billion units, reports TrendForce.

Yole released a smartphone camera comparison report with a focus on iPhone evolution and analysis of the structure, design, and teardown of each camera module, along with the CIS dimensions, technology node, and manufacturing processes.

Counterpoint released a number of 2023 reports on smartphone shipments by country and operator migrations to 5G.

Events

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here, including topics such as digital twins, power challenges in data centers, and designing for 112G interface compliance.

Further Reading and Newsletters

Read the latest special reports and top stories, or check out the latest newsletters:

Systems and Design
Low Power-High Performance
Test, Measurement and Analytics
Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials
Automotive, Security and Pervasive Computing

The post Chip Industry Week In Review appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

In the days before the U.S. Democratic Party’s New Hampshire primary election on 23 January, potential voters began receiving a call with AI-generated audio of a fake President Biden urging them not to vote until the general election in November. In Slovakia a Facebook post contained fake, AI-generated audio of a presidential candidate planning to steal the election—which may have tipped the election in another candidate’s favor. Recent elections in Indonesia and Taiwan have been marred by AI-generated misinformation, too.

In response to the faux-Biden robocall in New Hampshire, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission moved to make AI-generated voices in robocalls illegal on 8 February. But experts IEEE Spectrum spoke to aren’t convinced that the move will be enough, even as generative AI brings new twists to old robocall scams and offers opportunities to turbocharge efforts to defraud individuals.

The total lost to scams and spam in the United States in 2022 is thought to be US $39.5 billion, according to TrueCaller, which makes a caller ID and spam-blocking app. That same year, the average amount of money lost by people scammed in the United States was $431.26, according to a survey by Hiya, a company that provides call-protection and identity services. Hiya says that amount stands to go up as the usage of generative AI gains traction.

“In aggregate, it’s mind-boggling how much is lost to fraud perpetuated through robocalls,” says Eric Burger, the research director of the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative at Virginia Tech.

“I don’t think we can appreciate just how fast the telephone experience is going to change because of this.” —Jonathan Nelson, Hiya

AI Will Make It Easier for Scammers to Target Individuals

“The big fear with generative AI is it’s going to take custom-tailored scams and take them mainstream,” says Jonathan Nelson, director of product management at Hiya. In particular, he says, generative AI will make it easier to carry out spear-phishing attacks.

The Cost of Phone Fraud

• United States: $431.26
• UK: $324.04
• Canada: $472.87
• France: $360.62
• Germany: $325.87
• Spain: $282.35

Source: Hiya

Generally, phishing attacks aim to trick people into parting with personal information, such as passwords and financial information. Spear-phishing, however, is more targeted: The scammer knows exactly whom they’re targeting, and they’re hoping for a bigger payout through a more tailored approach. Now, with generative AI, Nelson says, a scammer can scrape social-media sites, draft text, and even clone a trusted voice to part unsuspecting individuals from their money en masse.

With the FCC’s unanimous vote to make generative AI in robocalls illegal, the question naturally turns to enforcement. That’s where the experts whom IEEE Spectrum spoke to are generally doubtful, although many also see it as a necessary first step. “It’s a helpful step,” says Daniel Weiner, the director of the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program, “but it’s not a full solution.” Weiner says that it’s difficult for the FCC to take a broader regulatory approach in the same vein as the general prohibition on deepfakes being mulled by the European Union, given the FCC’s scope of authority.

Burger, who was the FCC’s chief technology officer from 2017 to 2019, says that the agency’s vote will ultimately have an impact only if it starts enforcing the ban on robocalls more generally. Most types of robocalls have been prohibited since the agency instituted the Telephone Consumer Protection Act in 1991. (There are some exceptions, such as prerecorded messages from your dentist’s office, for example, reminding you of an upcoming appointment.)

“Enforcement doesn’t seem to be happening,” says Burger. “The politicians like to say, ‘We’re going after the bad guys,’ and they don’t—not with the vigor we’d like to see.”

Robocall Enforcement Tools May Not Be Enough Against AI

The key method to identify the source of a robocall—and therefore prevent bad actors from continuing to make them—is to trace the call back through the complex network of telecom infrastructure and identify the call’s originating point. Tracebacks used to be complicated affairs, as a call typically traverses infrastructure maintained by multiple network operators like AT&T and T-Mobile. However, in 2020, the FCC approved a mandate for network operators to begin implementing a protocol called STIR/SHAKEN that would, among other antirobocall measures, make one-step tracebacks possible.

“One-step traceback has been borne out,” says Burger. Traceback, for example, identified the source of the fake Biden calls targeting New Hampshire voters as a Texas-based company called Life Corporation. The problem, Burger says, is that the FCC, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, and state agencies aren’t providing the resources to make it possible to go after the sheer number of illegal robocall operations. Historically, the FCC has gone after only the very largest perpetrators.

“There is no stopping these calls,” says Hiya’s Nelson—at least not entirely. “Our job isn’t to stop them, it’s to make them unprofitable.” Hiya, like similar companies, aims to accomplish that goal by lowering the amount of successful fraud through protective services, including exposing where a call was created and by whom, to make it less likely that an individual will answer the call in the first place.

However, Nelson worries that generative AI will make the barrier to entry so low that those preventative actions will be less effective. For example, today’s scams still almost always require transferring the victim to a live agent in a call center to close out the scam successfully. With AI-generated voices, scam operators can eventually cut out the call center entirely.

“In aggregate, it’s mind-boggling how much is lost to fraud perpetuated through robocalls.” —Eric Burger, Virginia Tech

Nelson is also concerned that as generative AI improves, it will be harder for people to even recognize that they weren’t speaking to an actual person in the first place. “That’s where we’re going to start to lose our footing,” says Nelson. “We may have an increase in call recipients not realizing it’s a scam at all.” Scammers positioning themselves as fake charities, for example, could successfully solicit “donations” without donors ever realizing what actually happened.

“I don’t think we can appreciate just how fast the telephone experience is going to change because of this,” says Nelson.

One other complicating issue for enforcement is that the majority of illegal robocalls in the United States originate from beyond the country’s borders. The Industry Traceback Group found that in 2021, for example, 65 percent of all such calls were international in origin.

Burger points out that the FCC has taken steps to combat international robocalls. The agency made it possible for other carriers to refuse to pass along traffic from gateway providers—a term for network operators connecting domestic infrastructure to international infrastructure—that are originating scam calls. In December 2023, for example, the FCC ordered two companies, Solid Double and CallWin, to stop transmitting illegal robocalls or risk other carriers being required to refuse their traffic.

“Enforcement doesn’t seem to be happening. . . . not with the vigor we’d like to see.” —Eric Burger, Virginia Tech

The FCC’s recent action against generative AI in robocalls is the first of its kind, and it remains to be seen if regulatory bodies in other countries will follow. “I certainly think the FCC is setting a good example in swift and bold action in the scope of its regulatory authority,” says Weiner. However, he also notes that the FCC’s counterparts in other democracies will likely end up with more comprehensive results.

It’s hard to say how the FCC’s actions will stack up versus other regulators, according to Burger. As often as the FCC is way ahead of the curve—such as in spectrum sharing—it’s just as often way behind, such as the use of mid-band 5G.

Nelson says he expects to see revisions to the FCC’s decision within a couple of years, because it currently prevents companies from using generative AI for legitimate business practices.

It also remains to be seen whether the FCC’s vote will have any real effect. Burger points out that, in the case of calls like the fake Biden one, it was already illegal to place those robocalls and impersonate the president, so making another aspect of the call illegal likely won’t be a game-changer.

“By making it triply illegal, is that really going to deter people?” Burger says.