Do Not Call still a good law
Politicians get a pass on the Do Not Call law in part because they are considered “nonprofits.”
Well, not if you work it right, but that’s another issue.
Do Not Call has lowered the blood pressure of millions of Americans once interrupted at their dinner table by dolts who used the telephone as a marketing weapon. Even if you told each human irritant to put you on their company’s do-not-call list, the number of potential assailants was inexhaustible. The regulatory challenge was overwhelming.
Do Not Call, enacted in 2003, stopped the madness. To block the calls, all Americans had to do was call a toll-free Federal Trade Commission number, or register on its Web site. Ten million numbers were registered in just the first four days. The list has since grown to 145 million. You could call Do Not Call great law-making.
Peace, depending on the volubility of your family, has returned to meal time.
To preserve that peace, Congress is in the process of making permanent what was, at least in the minds of FTC officials, only a five-year cease-fire. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers is among the co-sponsors of that legislation in the House of Representatives.
As if to underscore how important the law remains, the FTC on Wednesday announced settlements with six companies for a total $7.7 million in penalties. The offenders, who admit no guilt, were accused of getting consumer information using sweepstakes, third-party sellers, or other dodges. The agency has obtained 34 such settlements for Do Not Call abuses, in the process collecting $16 million in penalties and securing $8 million in restitution for consumers.
Several states, meanwhile, are pursuing mailers of “lead cards,” which offer to send consumers more information on political or personal finance issues, among others, if they will provide addresses and telephone numbers. The cards, when returned, open the way to telemarketers.
“If you are not paying attention to the fine print, your personal information is being sold over and over and over,” says Kristin Alexander, spokeswoman for Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna. The cards are a common tool – when was the last time you filled out a sweepstakes entry at the mall? – but complaints about abuses in Washington have been few.
Other problems have come up, including an attempt last year by a Spokane company to get around Do Not Call by dedicating a small part of its revenues to charity. McKenna put a stop to that.
Alexander says the more pressing problem is spam-texting to cellular phones. Some cell phone users are finding that by signing up for some services, ring tones, for example, they are opening themselves up to spam. Some are receiving calls from computers programmed to blindly dial known cell numbers.
“Many people do not understand how easy it is to send text spam,” she says, adding “Nowadays, personal information is a commodity.”
Personal, and political.
The end of this election cycle should suspend for a while the annoying onslaught from political promoters and pollsters who have recently been exercising their right, however impolitic, to call voters. Robotic calls are especially off-putting.
Unfortunately, the recent noise level was a mere appetizer for the telephonic roar ahead in 2008, when state and federal candidates will light up the lines with their propaganda, er, political free speech, that is.