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FCC hits Verizon with $1M fine for dropping 911 calls, again • The Register
(www.theregister.com)
Wow, a whole $1 million. They’ll notice that for like seven seconds.
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
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They won't notice, as fines are already in the cost projections.
The depressing fact this is already in their calculations really suggests fines should be vary based on a percentage of the company’s profits, not a set number for all.
If you do something illegal, and the result is a fixed fine, it's only "illegal" for poor people. Rich people dgaf if they have to pay fine/ticket.
Never profits. Must be revenue.
Companies have ways of looking like they don't make a profit, especially when it comes to filing taxes.
"Oh, we created a subsidiary in Ireland and, gosh darn, they charged us a gagillion dollars for this pen. We actually have a loss this year."
Beat
"Stimulus please!"
I believe that is why people made such a fuss about the GDPR allowing courts to slap companies for up to 4% of their worldwide annual revenue. Whether or not that full extent is ever brought to bear against particularly megacorps is a different question, but at least medium-sized companies will probably avoid repeat offenses. I don't know how Meta felt about the 1.2 billion ticket either, but I can't imagine they just shrugged it off as normal business expenses.
Or it shouldn't be a fine, but criminal prosecution for the executives responsible.
And have been passed on to the consumer in doing so.
The real punishment ought to be an atomic wedgie. For everyone who was a C-level for more than a month at that company in the last 10 years.
This ought to be the punishment for a lot of unethical business practices. You can't delegate that to a customer's wallet.
No they won't, but now they where deemed at fault, let the civil litigation begin. As this is the American way.
Verizon, "Stop, it tickles!"
Yup, the fine needs to be much higher. People could have died because of this.
The entire point of fines is that they're punitive. They're supposed to HURT. To make you change your behavior and not do the Bad Thing again.
If fines don't even make a dent in your daily profits, then laws become nothing more than suggestions. They become just a cost of doing business.
Repeat after me "Fines need to be tied to global revenue". It has to hurt, if you want companies to stop.
Why can’t all cell providers have an agreement where if the user dials 911 or whatever the equivalent is in their country your phone will connect to any network if your provider isn’t currently available and route the call.
Being restricted to only your network when another provider might have a cell tower nearby with full signal is ridiculous in an emergency.
As I understand it...That's exactly how mobile phones work when you dial emergency number. if your operator has no signal, it automatically selects the strongest cell signal and attempts it through that. And you don't even have to know the country equivalent number, dialing 911 will automatically route to the local emergency center. There's a list of numbers that are recognized as emergency numbers by the phone/sim, but the actual number is not even used when the call is initiated. In general as long as you have a phone with battery left, you should be able to make a call to emergency center.
I believe 911 will work without even a provider. I've obviously never tried it. Maybe without a card even
It'll work without a valid provider or without a SIM at all. As long as it has battery and can pick up any network's signal.
Verizon is probably the provider for the 911 dispatch center. So calls will be carried by the network and Verizon trips them at the door.
Oh no! Not a million dollars! I what ever will they do?
How about a 100*million*million dollars? Put them out of business and T-Mobile will be frightened enough to not try this shit any longer.
If they can slap fines with whatever amounts, why don't they just ask enough to finance the country and make the company bankrupt? It's not like the CEO is indispensable
1M ? only? they should let costumers not pay for a year! +1Billion $ People gonna die because Verizon decided to drop 911 calls? You have to be very stupid.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
America's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has fined Verizon a little over a million dollars for failing to route 911 calls during a cellular outage.
The outage occurred on December 21, 2022, killing calls to Verizon's Voice over LTE (VoLTE) operations in six southeastern states for an hour and 44 minutes.
The FCC says this mistake should have been caught before the outage happened, but claims Verizon employees weren't enforcing proper oversight like they were supposed to be doing.
The plan details several practices that Verizon should ideally have already implemented, such as providing a checklist for employees to follow, testing proposed network changes before they're applied, and of course removing buggy security policies when they're discovered.
"Ensuring ultra-reliable connectivity, especially when callers need to reach emergency services, is a cornerstone of our company," Verizon told The Register.
We understand the critical importance of maintaining a robust and reliable 911 network, and we're committed to ensuring that our customers can always rely on our services in times of need."
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