Posted on 09/25/2003 4:10:17 PM PDT by Hotdog
War of the laws?...whats next?
You receive all kinds of garbage on your TV that you don’t want. You can install an answering machine for next to nothing if you don’t want to talk to them. If none of those 50 million signed up were prone to purchasing, telemarketers wouldn’t care.
No problem. Especially now that the precedent is set. My racist neighbor wants all blacks on his do not call list and doesn’t want to rent to them or have them enter his motel. Calls it trespassing… I’ll suggest he put you down as a reference.
You choose to turn your phone on. Your TV makes noise even when you don’t want it to. I hear CNN referenced everywhere, even here. Apparently, you support ABC’s right to “theft of service” every time you scan through them on your TV. I think you’re selective objections are “silly”.
There actually is one very big difference.
If you and some of your neighbors put "No Solicitors" signs on your front doors, the door-to-door salesmen can simply see the signs, avoid those homes, go to the ones without the signs, and be in full compliance with the law with minimal effort and no special cost. Furthermore, what you have there is a level playing field for ALL door-to-door salesmen. What is more, if everyone in your neighborhood puts up signs, fine, but if there are those who don't put up signs because they DO want to be called on by door-to-door salesmen, nobody has restricted their right to receive such salesmen on to their property.
On the other hand, as the "Do Not Call" registry is presently implemented, the ONLY way that ANY business, no matter how large or how small, can discover whether or not ANYONE has posted the telephonic equivalent of that "No Solicitors" sign is to pay $7,735 per year for access to the national registry -- even if they are a small business and only need to look up an occasional number, even only one per year. Businesses can get free look-up access for up to five area codes, but have to pay for the rest of the US. $7,735 might not sound like a whole lot to you, and it may not be a whole lot to giant corporations, but for many small businesses, that can represent a big chunk of their total marketing budget. On the other hand, if they don't pay the $7,735 per year, make even one call outside of their 5-area-code region that happens to be to someone on the Do-Not-Call Registry, they could get hit with an $11,000 fine. It is not the big telemarketing companies that will get hurt under this scheme -- they'll invest the $7K, program the list into their system, and proceed to call everyone that doesn't have that telephonic "No Solicitors" sign. But the small business that might have occasion to call up a single lead here or there every once in a while will be out of luck. They can't spend the money to comply, they can't afford to risk being fined for not complying, so they simply won't risk making calls outside of their 5-area-code region. In effect, what we've got here is the equivalent of some people in the neighborhood having "No Solicitors" signs, but now they are in invisible ink, and they can only be seen if you buy a $7,735 device from the government, otherwise if you knock on a door and then discover that it had an invisible sign, then the government hits you up with an $11,000 fine. Who is it that is really being "protected" in this protection racket? This is NOT a level playing field; I believe that it can fairly be called "restraint of trade", and that's neither right nor beneficial to consumers.
I'm not against the Do-Not-Call Registry, I've even signed up myself. What I AM against is the failure of the FTC to provide a free single-number lookup service on their website. That is all that most small businesses would ever need, and it would not be all that difficult for the FTC to program. The refusal of the government to implement this simple little expedient is indicative to me that another agenda than "consumer protection" is at work here, and that it is small businesses, rather than mass-dialing telemarketers, that are really getting the short end of the stick here.
"Do Not Call", AKA "The India Telemarkers Full Employment Act"
Point taken.
And given that, we should dispense with the tar-and-feathering and go straight to the hanging.
Total households: 105M (2000 Census)
Percent households with telephones: 96% (extrapolated from 1990 Census).
Modified total households: 101M
Average residents per household: 2.62 (2000 Census)
Total signataries to the Do-Not-Call list: 51M
Total number of US residents screwed by this judge: 134M
Potential total number of US residents screwed by this rat judge if all households with telephones sign up to the registry: 265M
No surprise the Congress acted in record time. And this judge had better sign up for "Call Waiting". LOL!
If you can’t recognize the difference between the race care (calling someone a racist) and applying extreme criteria for don’t call list selection to show the arbitrary nature of what might annoy someone, that’s not my problem.
The Constitutional right to ring somebody else's phone even when that somebody doesn't want you to ring their phone -- now that's BOR material.
Your spin is not mine.
See my post #390. bye
The access point owner has the right to limit the speech of telemarketers on your phone, but you the owner of the phone, and you the partial owner of the public phone lines doesn't????
I’ll give your delusion the attention it deserves.
The access owner has no right to limit speech. He has the right to refuse to support it. But when the government steps in and says you’ll do it our way (or the listener's way) or we’ll fine or jail you, that’s limiting speech.
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