Do-Not-Call Listing Remains Up in air

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Do-Not-Call Listing Remains Up in Air After Day of Twists

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG with MATT RICHTEL

Published: September 26, 2003

[]
Associated Press
A ruling by Judge Lee R. West on the do-not-call registry sent Congress into action.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 25 — In a swift display of bipartisan unity, Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation today aimed at allowing a national do-not-call registry against unwanted telemarketing to take effect next week as planned. But hours after the vote, which effectively rendered moot a federal judge's injunction against the registry, a second judge declared the program a violation of free speech.

I cannot understand the Judges decision. I understand the public has no right to limit what we are being subjected to on the news, TV, or radio but I cannot understand why we cannot on a medium that we buy and pay for. I can only wonder who bought and paid for those judges, judgeship. Do you believe there is a freedom of speech issue involved?
At times I am amazed and disgusted by the tyranny of the judiciary who seem to interpret the constitution based on their own personal prejudices.
http://www.nytimes.com/ads/41003_amexpopunder.html

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I'm in the minority on this one, au.

The freedom of speech issue for me comes in relative to the legislative stifling.

I'm not in favor of do-not-call, and not just because a lot of my living is made on the phone.

This legislation puts tens of thousands, and perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people out of work.

And it's not like telemarketing is an upwardly mobile career path. What do you suppose people who lose their job in this profession do next? Something involving a hairnet?

I also have a hard time understanding why so many people consider their phone ringing such a wretched invasion of their privacy. Have they not heard of Caller ID? Or how about simply not answering the phone?

Now, I'm not a tinfoil hatter--really--but I was sure amused at some of their responses to the Do-Not-Call list: "Sure, I'm going to give Crisco John my persoanl information. John Poindexter just got a fresh, up-to-date, fifty-million member database. What might he do with that?"

I say let them call. Nobody's forcing anyone to answer the phone.

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PDiddie
How may times have you ignored the ring of the phone?
Do you take the same position regarding Spam? If a person does not want to get the annoying phone calls they should be able to choose not to. That is freedom of choice. It is apparent from the number of households that have signed up, 50 million and counting that they have made that choice. And some cockamamie judge should not be able to take that choice away.

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au1929 wrote:

PDiddie
Do you take the same position regarding Spam?

Actually I am less inclined to be supportive of e-mail solicitation due to its ubiquitous and highly offensive nature, but it is much easier to discard...

I don't hear so much grousing about junk mail as I used to. This falls into the same category, IMO. Just toss it if you don't want it.

I think the D-N-C legislation is a loser on 1st Amendment grounds, though I understand the frustration of the nearly one-third of US households who've signed up. I don't think Uncle Sam is looking out for anyone by compiling a list, though.

Perversely, if hundreds of thousands of people are down-sized and that assists in Whistle Ass' ejection from the WH next year, it can't be all bad...

On the other hand, if you think your life will improve dramatically as a result of no telemarketing calls, don't complain when you see those people dealing, pimping, whoring, and breaking into homes in your neighborhood.

The little guys and gals can't take much more shafting.

Just think it's a bad idea in several ways, already posted.

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PDiddie
Telemarketers,if that is what is needed to support our economy and to control crime than this country ought to fold up it's tent and give up.

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PDiddie, there was a letter to the NYT yesterday that said that the vast majority of cell centers are for receiving calls, not for outgoing calls. That seemed to imply (I'm not sure of this) that the claims for the huge number of jobs that stand to be lost are inflated. I.e. there are many many people who work at call centers who WON'T be adversely affected by the Do Not Call list.

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Well, au, and not to pick nits, on another thread you bemoan the loss of manufacturing jobs in this country and its deleterious effects on our national economy.

Everything about our nation's economy has trended away from manufacturing and toward service in the last several years, if not decades.

Were it not for defense contractors, there would be precious little being manufactured in this country today.

Even telemarketing, for that matter, is being outsourced to India and the like as conservative business owners tirelessly search for cheaper labor.

Technology itself is eliminating jobs. Most people don't require the services of a bank teller, as they are direct-deposited and utilize ATM and debit cards; there are now self-scan aisles at your local market; service companies would much rather you log on and do your own research rather than pay someone to sit around waiting for you to ask them a question.

Why do you think it takes so long to get a human being on the phone when you call a company?

Because employees want health insurance, for one thing.

There's a day of reckoning coming for this economy for certain, and I'm not at all sure ridding ourselves of Bush is going to help with it.

But, I digress...

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PDiddie
I agree our economy is in dire straights. What we need is a rebirth of manufacturing jobs. Service jobs will not make up for the loss of manufacturing. The bottom line is you must make that wigit to sell. The economy can not maintain itself on Walmarts selling producrts manufactured off shore or telamarketers annoying the **** out of people.

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pdiddie

Quote:

There's a day of reckoning coming for this economy for certain, and I'm not at all sure ridding ourselves of Bush is going to help with it.

As much as I would like to heap all the blame on Bush I am aware that the situation is not of his making. The erosion of our economy began at least 40 years ago. IMO we are if it cannot be checked headed for an economy much like a banana republic. Rich and poor and a small middle class.

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I agree with both of your posts above, au, and I have no suggestions for solutions.

There is not much point in building a better mousetrap if no one wil be able to afford it anyway...

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PDiddie, do you have any stats on how many people actually stand to lose their jobs? Not trying to back you into a corner, am genuinely curious.

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To digress a bit:

People are getting more and more sophisticated about tuning out advertising, of any kind. There are things like cable and TiVo that help that out -- people are willing to pay a premium to avoid being bombarded with advertising. But advertising, by definition, needs to get under the noses of people who are not otherwise interested. If someone is already buying Tide, they are not who Tide wants to target with an ad. Tide wants to target someone who hasn't yet tried Tide.

I've been on both sides of this, particularly in terms of soliciting funds, and can see how it is frustrating for the advertisers to have their opportunities for getting their product/ service under people's noses reduced. Then you see things like the ads in cabs that nimh (?) mentioned here a while ago.

I do think, however, that the do-not-call list just makes sense. For one thing, how many people will actually sign up? I don't think it will be even the majority of possible callees. (I'd love to see a study on this.) Caller ID helps but doesn't solve the problem (we have it, we still get nabbed by telemarketers.)

I think there is enough element of choice here that it doesn't strike me as a first amendment issue.

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I don't have caller ID. I haven't wanted to pay for the service. Should I be forced to spend the money so that telemarketers won't bother me? And don't you still have to get up and look at the display to see who's calling? Even if you don't answer the phone, they have still disturbed you.

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And if you have a baby in the house, the phone ringing in and of itself can be a disaster. Yes, you can turn off the ringer, or take it off the hook, but these are again actions that are a hassle and may impede actual important communication.

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I should like to add one more element to the controversy. How many time have you answered the phone and found no one on the other end. It is my understanding at least I read it some time ago. That telemarketers automatically dial up 4 numbers at a time and the first one who picks up gets the message the other three get silence. In addition how many people are employed when the message is a computer driven one. Hey you have just won a trip to lower slabovia call ------ to get your prize.

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Most telemarketers block their number, so if you have caller ID, you still won't know if it's them or a friend, since most people block their numbers these days.

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Exactly, fealola. If you check the ID and it has your friend's name, you know you can pick up. But if you check the ID and it's blocked, you don't know if it's a telemarketer or a friend who has a blocked ID. So you pick up, and then...

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sozobe wrote:

PDiddie, do you have any stats on how many people actually stand to lose their jobs?

Two million, according to the American Teleservices Association (hardly unbiased). From Slate:

Quote:

A compelling case is argued in the same article against the statistics as well as the logic.

But I'm not making that case, so if you want to read it, you'll have to click on the link.

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Thanks for the link, PDiddie. It's a good one.

I'll excerpt some more:

Quote:

But it sounds dubious. Searcy's numbers are predicated on 60 million do-not-callees. So far, only 48.4 million have signed up. Presumably, most of these are people who have made a habit of hanging up on telemarketers. And the federal list doesn't represent a sudden tidal wave of backlash against unwanted phone calls. Over the past several years, 37 states have created their own do-not-call lists, which collectively contain 14 million numbers. By Searcy's account, "so far, the impact has been slowly absorbed over time." In fact, teleservices have been growing at about 10 percent annually for the last decade, despite the state call lists.

What's more, the federal Do Not Call list is not an outright prohibition on all telemarketing. It explicitly exempts political organizations, charities, and telephone surveyors from the ban. And companies that have existing business relationships with customers can keep dialing. Under the new regime, American Express can call its cardholders with vacation offers, and the Gallup Organization can still ask for a few minutes of your time. As important, the Do Not Call list says nothing about business-to-business telemarketing.

Such apparent exceptions in fact constitute a big chunk of the teleservices industry. "For the ATA to say that this will amount to 2 million lost jobs in my opinion is ludicrous," says Thomas Cardella, chairman and CEO of Precision Response Corp., a subsidiary of Barry Diller's Interactive Corp., which has no plans to lay off any of its 12,000 phone-based employees. "Eighty percent of our work is taking inbound calls," mostly on behalf of Fortune 500 companies, says Cardella. And the firm's outbound business is split evenly between business-to-business calls and calls to consumers who have existing relationships with businesses.

(Emphasis mine.)

The article seems a good summary of the sides of the debate, and I tend to agree that it is the market at work.

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Why isn't anyone as concerned about the millions of tobacco growers being put out of work by society's changing attitudes toward the annoyances produced by that occupation?

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Do-Not-Call Listing Remains Up in air

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