Photographer: Thomas Barwick/Getty Images

The government is going to try to keep the telemarketers and robo-dialers away from your phone. Again.

The great Do Not Call registry effort of 2003 worked for a while, giving people some power to stop solicitors and scammers from ringing in over copper wires. But technological advances and the mobile-phone era brought the national annoyance back. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission gets more complaints about unwanted calls and texts than anything else, and on Thursday it adopted new guidelines intended to curb them.

Linda Blase can’t wait. “I get far more junk calls on my home phone than legitimate calls from people I actually want to speak to,” Blase, a small-business owner and consumer activist in Dallas, told the U.S. Senate Committee on Aging on June 10. “These calls are uninvited intrusions into my home.”

There’s been a surge in them as computerized autodialers, often in offshore locales, have circumvented the do-not-call system, which lets people register their phones to block unwanted calls from telemarketers and others.

Telephone companies have said FCC rules prevent their blocking robocalls. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler disagreed.

“The consumer should be in control” and able to tell telephone companies to block calls, Wheeler said. And he made a direct appeal: “Phone companies: Please start letting your consumers request to have robocalls blocked.”

‘Less Bad’

Chances are the agency won’t be able to end the nightmare.

“You’ll never be able to solve the problem,” said Avi Greengart, an analyst with the market research firm Current Analysis, “but you can certainly try to make it less bad.”

Another step lets consumers revoke consent to receive calls “in any reasonable way at any time.”

The FCC expanded permission for robocalls from banks, health-care providers and pharmaceutical companies, which no longer need to get consent from a consumer before dialing, Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, said at the agency’s meeting.

“They get a loophole,” Rosenworcel said. “The result is obvious -- consumers can expect to receive more robocalls from health-care providers and banking institutions.”

A bill in Congress would increase the fines on illegal telemarketers, such as so-called spoofers purporting to be from the Internal Revenue Service or a person’s bank or a merchandiser selling a product that doesn’t exist.

Company Options

Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat and the sponsor of that bill, said during the June 10 hearing that phone companies are best positioned to orchestrate blocking. “To my frustration, industry representatives have continued to insist that the law does not allow them to do this,” she said.

The U.S. Telecom Association, a trade group whose members include AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., told the FCC in a filing that one thing complicating company efforts to combat the calls include the agency’s findings that carriers can’t restrict telecommunications traffic “in any way.”

The vote Thursday could take care of that, though not the problem. “Not all bad calls would get blocked,” said Henning Schulzrinne, a former FCC chief technologist and a Columbia University professor.

Illicit marketers can disguise their numbers, so that blocking devices won’t see them, and can make calls appear to come from trusted sources.

PayPal Policy

EBay Inc.’s PayPal unit recently stepped into the fray when it updated its policy to require users to agree to receive autodialed or prerecorded calls. PayPal clarified its policy two weeks ago to allow customers to choose not to receive such calls, said Martha Cass, a PayPal spokeswoman.

PayPal President Dan Schulman got a letter from four U.S. senators anyway. “Consumers should not have to agree to submit themselves to intrusive robocalls in order to use a company’s service,” they said. The signers were Democrats Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Al Franken of Minnesota, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, and Ron Wyden of Oregon.

The phone-call issue rings up frustration on both sides of the aisle.

“We thought we had put an end to the plague of unwelcomed telemarketers who were interrupting Americans’ morning, noon and night,” said Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, at the hearing. “But now, nearly 12 years later, phones are once again ringing off the hook.”

McCaskill’s bill is S. 1540.