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House Votes to Launch Do-Not-Call List
Zendar writes "Yahoo! has a story on how it took less than an hour with a final vote of 412-8 to approve the 'do not call list'. "Votes to overturn the judge's order are expected mid-afternoon in both chambers, according to Republican leadership aides." The President is expected to sign today. Some choice quotes: "Fifty million Americans can't be wrong." and "This bill will pass faster than a consumer hanging up on a telemarker at dinner time." CNN also has the story."
Why can't they pass an anti-spam bill as quickly?
I posted my incisive and witty commentary on this matter of vital national importance earlier this afternoon.
While I am on the list and would very much like to see it go through, it irratates me when I hear statements like "Fifty million Americans can't be wrong.".
Popular votes are routinely wrong and a number of them have had horrible consequences.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Telemarketing will die because the telemarkers finally managed to make themselves obsolete by increasing their most annoying habits (pre-recorded autodialers, calling during dinner every night) that people had finally just had enough. This will be bad for the economy in the short term in some places where this business thrives, but it's not as devastating as some would have you believe.
Industries form and evaporate all the time, yet the economy survives. Those people that are currently engaged in telemarketing will find some other way to make money, and markets will adapt. The economy didn't implode when the automobile devastated the buggy whip business, and it won't implode due to this either. The real fear is what sort of even more annoying marketing tactics will be invented now that this one is being slapped down.
It's certainly pleasing to see that on at least one issue of national import, our elected reprentatives can all pull together for an effective resolution.
I'm rather disappointed by the negativity that has been heaped on Judge West for his ruling suspending enforcement of the law, though. It's the job of the judiciary to keep the executive branch (in this case, the FTC) from overstepping the bounds of their authority granted to them by the legislative branch. If there was a question as to whether or not Congress granted the FTC sufficient authority to create such a list, enforcement of it certainly should be suspended until the matter is resolved. In this case, Congress (well, the House, anyway) has made itself clear on the matter -- they have explicitly placed the creation and enforcement of the list in the mandate. Unless West does something foolish at this juncture, like continuing to try to fight the enforcement of the list, he should be commended for doing his job of keeping the government consistent.
Funnily enough, in the UK, many people find that most of their spam comes from the USA. If you could kindly get your government to do a similarly fine job on spam, I would get less offers for enlargement of body parts and other tempting offers...
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
How long have telephones been around?
Doesn't sound quick to me at all. They aren't passing a bill saying No Telemarketing, they are passing a bill saying the FCC can have a Do Not Call List. BIG DIFFERENCE.
Call the FCC for a Do Not SPAM list.
Congress created the FTC, and Congress can change the FTC's mission. Congress explicitedly told the FTC to create the Do-Not-Call list. Hence, they did not stray outside their area.
It has been pointed out that this claim is hyperbole. Most people who work for call banks work for a specific company. For example, a bank which calls its own customers. Such calls are still legal.
But that is laisse faire captialism, which we don't have in this country.
Funny, but a very good point too. But this does show that when the people are upset enough about something, the government will have to react. The trick is to get enough people to care about the cause that it will make the reps sweat around election time.
Now that the RIAA is going after Joe Sixpack and his family, you are going to see the same kind of backlash against them only in a much faster and more brutal way. Some reps have already come forth looking rather nervous about what the RIAA is doing and some have even given at least lip service to legistlation to stop the RIAA.
With telemarketing, you just got bothered to buy crap and you could hang up. With the RIAA, you get a letter and you have to pay them thousands of dollars or you have to pay a lawyer thousands of dollars to try to get you out of it. Common people will react to that far more vehemantly than they did to telemarketing, just wait, in about six months expect to see a lot of reps and senetors start abandoning the RIAA ship as public antagonism aginst the RIAA and its tactics builds up.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
"Ted Strickland, D-Ohio;"
"Hopefully voters will remember how well the dissenting congressmen "represented" them the next time they go to the polls."
I don't know any of the rest of them but I do know Ted Strickland. Ted Strickland wants to protect peopele's jobs in his area, and yes, there is at least one Telemartking firm located in his district in southeastern Ohio that employs at least 500 people.
Now I have no clue how many of those jobs may or may not be lost by this bill, but the fact is, he is voting to protect those jobs. I personally fail to see how it is some great inconvenience to have telemarketers calling you every so often. Its putting food on someone's table, and is better than them being on welfare. My brother in law worked for the firm for a time. In that impovershed area of the country good paying jobs are hard to come by.
So yes, I think Mr. Strickland represented his area well. He wanted to protect some jobs that some people have, regardless of the slight inconvenience of a few.
It's clear that the F.T.C. has been engaging in regulatory imperialism and ruled outside it's area.
Clear? Outside its area? How so? That is the Federal Trade Commission. It would seem that they are in charge of regulating trade that crosses state lines.
Several analysts have ponted out that this coud mean milions of lost jobs in an important industry.
Boo hoo. No one ever guaranteed that "industry" a profit.
Everyone knows that this could mean the end off telemarketing as an economical way of doing bussiness.
So be it. See above. Let them find a different business model. One that is not so intrusive upon the consumer.
While many of us don't like people selling us things we don't like but thats capiatalism you know.
Capitalism does not include the forcing of your selling mechanism upon me. You can advertise all you want. I have the right not to be bothered with it if I don't want to.
With telephone advertising, there is really no method, short of unplugging the phone, to turn it off. The DNC list provides citizens that method.
Telemarketers can go to hell.
In my experience, having been called by telemarketers an average of 5-10 times a day, and having lived in a town with a great deal of telemarketing corporations, with a great deal of friends who worked at these corporations, I can honestly say I would be absolutely SHOCKED if a single telemarketing firm out there was selling a good product at a reasonable price.
These firms exist solely to fleece unsuspecting invidiuals out of their money by being rude and aggressive on the phone.
May they burn in hell forever, and no, I have litte to no sympathy for the people working these jobs.
It puts food on your table? Great, you just took that money from some old lady on social security who would have otherwise used it to pay for prescription medication, and sold her a crummy product that won't work for more than a few days.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
The real outcome of this is that the direct marketing industry will realize that they don't spend nearly enough money on Washington lobbyists and campaign contributions (like the tech industry realized after they started getting beaten up by the hill).
Expect a significant increase in spending by the direct marketing industry on lobbyists and campaign contributions. Then, a few years from now, expect several new bills expanding the list of exemptions to the do-not-call list.
Well then, just post your email address and I'll sign you up to make sure a lot of spammers can put food on the table.
Frankly, another person's right to earn a living ends when it invades on my right to privacy.
So what you're saying is that the other 630,500 people in Ohio's 6th district are wrong? Last I recall, the job of the representative is to 'represent' the views of his/her constituency. This seems to fly contrary to that charter.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
He's a former Libertarian candidate for President, and reflexively votes against anything that expands government regulation.
This context is important, because this means he very well could be a keeper (the value of having a Constitional defender in Congress shouldn't be underestimated, even if he is annoying).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
It won't. It doesn't stand a chance.
I was an evil one. I used to call you during dinner.
3 days later you had a dude at your house selling you windows, and it costed you $850 a window.
Our business was on the up and up. We didn't break any laws. We confirmed all of our appoitments and kicked old single people off our schedules.
But what always impressed me about the company was there resiliancy.
I see at least two tools they can use to get out from under this.
The first is the polling hole. If politicians are serious about this thing they need to close that hole. They won't do it, cause politicians can't make up there mind without a poll, but the only way to make it work is to close that hole.
'Hello Mr. Smith I am calling on behalf of Windows company.
We are conducting a poll. Does your house have windows?
How many?'
---end of polling portion of call----
See how easy that hole is to exploit?
There is another hole. I can't really think of a way to close this one. But if the consumer is careful they don't have to worry about it.
That one has to do with the customer contacting the business first. If the business can show that the customer contacted them then it really isn't the kind of telemarketing call that this 'do not call' registry covers.
I know what you are thinking.
And you are wrong.
There is nothing new about this hole, or the exploit.
All you have to do is offer a 'free' drawing.
When will people learn that only 'nothing' is free?
We used to set up kiosk stands in malls, fairs, home shows and just about anywhere else we could find to put them. We would put up a couple samples of windows and offer a free drawing for windows.
It was on the up and up we did give away free windows just like we said.
But once you fill out that card, guess what you have done?
You got it. You have now made a contact with our business. You have given us permission to call you.
Even if I am wrong on this, I am not very wrong. All these cards have small print (think EULA) on the back. All that really needs to be done is add a sentence that says 'by filling out this card homeowner gives permission to window company to make farther contact and phone calls to the homeowner.'.
I will be quite honest with you. I don't do that anymore. Now I am a computer operator. I make good money, I enjoy my job, I could do without the night work though. I don't really regret the 5 years I spent in that industry. On the contrary, I learned some very valuable lessons. Hell I don't think I would be doing what I am doing today without them.
But I am probably more annoyed with telemarketing calls then the average person. I work nights, 6pm-6am.
Know what 11am phone calls do to me?
That being said I have pity for the honest people in the industry. There are a lot of people that are honest, hard working and intelligent. There are retired people that need extra income. I would hate to see the industry shut down and these people all be out of work.
With that attitude I kind of look at telemarketing calls as my problem. When I get one I tell them to take me off the list. That is a legal thing by the way, there is more byte to that phrase then you would think. If they get too annoying I unplug the phone until I wake up.
I agree with you that I shouldn't have to do that. I understand everyones point as well. That is why I am not saying that the 'do not call registry' is evil.
It is not.
It just won't work.
Sure, it's small inconvenience. It's also a small return. Is it okay to steal, if you only steal five cents at a time? Eh, whatever, I don't care about five cents. What if you stole five cents at a time from every person in the country? That's the kind of equation telemarketers are making -- small returns from small inconveniences, multiplied by every person in the country.
We should stop worshipping jobs. We should start being concerned about productivity. Telemarketers have jobs, but they are completely unproductive. That's not the kind of economy I want to support.
When did bending-over for big business become "defending the constitution?"
Read the document sometime, you'll see the ideals of the Enlightement in print which include but are not limited to protection from government, protection from others, personal autonomy, democratic voice, freedom from religion, etc.
If an industry is considered a nuisance by a vast majority of Americans and is limited through grassroots effort this can easily be seen as a democratic action at work. Dissenters might say its the tyranny of the majority, but they can have my telemarking calls if they truly believe that. Something tells me they won't volunteer. Would Ron Paul "defender of the Constitution" let coal burning plants pollute your neighborhood because an overisght comission via the EPA is more "big bad government?"
Just because an industry exists doesn't mean that limiting it is 'big government.' Does Ron Paul want to live in country where we're citizens of corporations because of an irrational fear of "big bad government?" Probably. Would he let Microsoft go with a light slap on the wrist like Bush did. Definiately. Sorry about how your upstart was illegally crushed by the big business, but better that then more "big government" eh?
All the neolib economists, starting with old man Milton, would just love to tear down the state and the protections it provides and let us become modern day serfs.
Funny thing about free markets, they have a problem remaining free. Don't let that fact get in the way of a some irrational ideology though.
Its putting food on someone's table, and is better than them being on welfare.
"In other news, a recent crackdown on inner-city crime has caused a loss of jobs in the window-repair and alarm-system industries."
So should we all go around breaking windows to generate repair jobs? No. This is known as the broken-windows fallacy. What the naive "destruction == job-creation" analysis misses is that in the absence of all this destruction, people can put their time and capital to more productive uses. IOW, when people stop breaking in and stealing stuff, more businesses move in, existing businesses have to spend less on security, and more jobs are created.
The short-term, localized job-creation benefit of crime is more than offset by the long-term, distributed opportunity cost.
I personally fail to see how it is some great inconvenience to have telemarketers calling you every so often.
In the case of telemarketers, what is being destroyed is time and productivity. That "inconvenience", even though it is seems negligible, can really add up when integrated over the number of people it affects.
Let us suppose that there are 500 telemarketers whose full-time job it is to talk to people who do not want to hear from them (some of the 50 million people who explicitly said so by signing up for the list). They call these people, and take some time reading scripts to them and getting yelled at.
Clearly, they are wasting at least 500 full-time jobs worth of other people's time. But telemarketers use machines to do the dialing and ringing and so on, so they actually waste *more* of the victims' time. And it takes time to recover from an interruption, so you can add that time on there too.
This is time that people would otherwise be spending productively participating in the economy or resting to recharge for productively participating in the economy when they go back to work. People whose evenings are constantly disturbed by telemarketers go back to work less happy, less rested, and less productive, and so their employers, who were giving the employees this time off for a good reason, suffer because the returns on their investment in employee time off are lowered.
And, of course, we have the fact that the telemarketers are talking to people who don't want their crap anyway, so the whole thing is fruitless.
Telemarketers calling people who don't want their crap represent a net drain on the economy. The fact that the drain is spread out over lots of other businesses and workers and produces a tiny, localized benefit doesn't mean that it's good for the national economy as a whole, anymore than thieves are.
Finally, when you consider the fact that many of these jobs are going over to India, anyway, we lose even the job-creation benefit, and the drain is even greater.
ring ring ring who's there?
opted out, why a call this evening?
Mexico, you have phone too