The FCC's KYUP proposal aims to expose the upstream providers that carry illegal calls

Light Reading reports on the FCC’s proposed Know-Your-Upstream-Provider rules, which it frames as requirements “designed to expose providers that enable illegal calls and root them out of the voice ecosystem.” It’s a compact trade-press read on what the Commission is actually trying to do with the proposal.

KYUP is the upstream complement to the TRACED Act know-your-customer obligations the FCC has been advancing in parallel. KYC asks an originating provider to vet whoever hands it traffic to send; KYUP pushes that same diligence one hop further back, onto the intermediate and gateway providers that pass calls along the chain. Taken together they bracket the full “know your customer plus know your upstream” frame the Commission has been building toward for the call-authentication regime — closing the gap where a provider could disclaim responsibility for traffic it merely carried.

The tell is in the framing more than the mechanics. “Root them out” is enforcement language, not compliance language. The throughline of the last few years of robocall policy is that the Commission increasingly treats the providers who knowingly carry illegal traffic as the problem to solve, not just the spoofers at the edge — and KYUP is the diligence obligation that makes “you should have known” a usable standard against the midstream.