John Oliver Rips FCC And HBO Parent AT&T Amid Lengthy Rant About Robocalls

John Oliver took a swipe at HBO's new parent company AT&T during a segment on March 10''s "Last Week Tonight", which saw him decry the increasing amount of robocalls being made in the US and the Federal Communications Commission's unwillingness or inability to do anything about them. "Everybody is annoyed by robocalls; hatred of them might be the only thing everyone in America agrees on now," he said.He cited statistics that said the number of calls increased by 57 percent last year to nearly 50 billion in total. He also showed a news clip noting that robocalls are the No. 1 complaint to the FCC every year, totaling more than 500,000 complaints a year, about 60 percent of all complaints received by the FCC.

Oliver attacked the commissioners for failing to do more to eradicate the spam calls. "If only there were a way to get the FCC's attention," Oliver said. "One way to do that would be if someone had, I don't know, say, the office numbers of all five FCC commissioners. Because then you could, hypothetically, have a program to robocall all of those numbers every 90 minutes with a message, say, oh, I don't know. Like, this." He then played a recorded message that said, in his own voice: "Hi, FCC! This is John from customer service. Congratulations! You’ve just won a chance to lower robocalls in America today. Sorry, but I am a live person. Robocalls are incredibly annoying, and the person who can stop them is you! Talk to you again in 90 minutes. Here’s some bagpipe music." Oliver then pushed a big red button that he said would "unleash hell" on the commissioners.