The FCC wants to know who you are before you pick up a burner phone.
The Federal Communications Commission is seeking comment on a proposal that would require carriers to collect, at minimum, a customer's name, physical address, government-issued ID number, and an alternate phone number before granting service access. The rule would apply to new and renewing customers and is framed as a tool to combat robocallers. Prepaid phones - commonly called burner phones - are the obvious casualty, since their appeal is precisely that they don't require identification to use.
The problem is that the people who rely on anonymous prepaid phones aren't just criminals or telemarketers trying to avoid detection. The National Network to End Domestic Violence filed comments warning the FCC that privacy-protective behaviors it apparently views as suspicious are, for survivors of abuse, "well-established and often life-preserving safety practices." Stripping that option away in the name of nuisance call reduction is a significant trade-off the proposal doesn't appear to reckon with seriously.
The FCC has tried to crack down on robocalls for years with mixed results - carriers still pass billions of spam calls annually despite STIR/SHAKEN caller ID rules that went into effect years ago. Adding an ID mandate shifts the burden onto ordinary users while doing little to stop bad actors who will simply route around it. That's a pattern worth noticing.