France is banning unsolicited telemarketing calls starting next week

The useful signal was that this kind of ban can work when enforcement is real. Australia came up as the cleanest example. Commenters said telemarketing there largely disappeared once regulators started issuing large fines and required actual opt-in, not just a customer relationship. That framed the core point: the law itself is not the hard part. Cutting off the economic path for legitimate firms and punishing the domestic telecom or VoIP intermediaries is. Several people said the likely failure mode is what Spain saw after a similar move. Calls simply appear from international numbers or through internet telephony, which blurs where the caller is, where the number lives, and who is legally on the hook. The practical consensus was still that someone local usually exists in the chain. A VoIP provider, number allocator, or interconnect partner has to terminate the call into the national phone network. If regulators go after those entities, the ban can bite. If they do not, consumers just keep screening unknown numbers and businesses keep eroding trust in the phone channel altogether. That erosion of trust was a big subtext. People described ignoring unknown numbers, hanging up on legitimate calls, and treating most telemarketing as either scam-adjacent or a sign of a bad business. The ban was seen less as a speech issue than as hygiene for a communication channel that has become close to unusable for many people.