Everybody hates telemarketers, but the classic stranger on the line phone call has an important limiting factor: humans. Somebody has to get paid to make those calls, so there are big financial reasons for the spammers to knock it off.

Robocalls, on the other hand, require much less manpower so the bad actors have incentives to make a lot of them—even when rarely successful. With that in mind, Google, Samsung, Apple, and several other major tech corporations are getting together to try to protect consumers from predatory robocalls.