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."

Comments

How about an anti-spam bill?

[__aaowgu6674]

Why can't they pass an anti-spam bill as quickly?

Re:How about an anti-spam bill?

[igabe]

It's one thing to block a phone number. It's another to block an email.

Email is complicated. While most telemarketers seem to call from inside the US, email comes from all over the world.

Spam is too profitable and too complex to just stop with a finger. Making a quick initiative to block spam is often fatal as seen when the first spam filters came out. All of a sudden you didn't receive that one email saying you won the lottery. =)

Re:How about an anti-spam bill?

[eyegone]

Wrong.

Both individuals (natural persons) and corporations (artificial persons) have rights protected by the First Amendment. Commercial speech, however, is protected less than other types of speech. This is why false advertising laws are constitutional and apply equally to corporations, sole proprietorships, and partnerships.

Representative government?

[Ghazgkull]

The eight who voted against the bill were: Ron Paul, R-Texas; Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.; Kendrick Meek, D-Fla.; Tim Ryan, D-Ohio; Ted Strickland, D-Ohio; Lee Terry, R-Neb.; Rob Bishop, R-Utah, and Chris Cannon, R-Utah.

Hopefully voters will remember how well the dissenting congressmen "represented" them the next time they go to the polls.

Re:Representative government?

[ptbarnett]

Ron Paul is the House gadfly. He's a former Libertarian candidate for President, and reflexively votes against anything that expands government regulation.

Re:Representative government?

[WhiteWolf666]

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.

Re:Representative government?

[southpolesammy]

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.

Re:Representative government?

[pmz]

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).

Re:Representative government?

[tetrad]

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.

Perhaps Dave Barry said it best:

Leading the charge for the telemarketing industry is the American Teleservices Association (suggested motto: 'Some Day, We Will Get a Dictionary and Look Up 'Services''). This group argues that, if its members are prohibited from calling people who do not want to be called, then two million telemarketers will lose their jobs. Of course, you could use pretty much the same reasoning to argue that laws against mugging cause unemployment among muggers. But that would be unfair. Muggers rarely intrude into your home.

Re:Representative government?

[Corgha]

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.

In other news..

[Harald Paulsen]

..hell just froze over.

Re:In other news..

[Tackhead]

> ..hell just froze over.

Yeah, what the hell's going on here? Judge screws over 50,000,000 people because Congress screwed up. OK, so far, story makes sense.

But what's with Congress fixing the problem, especially fixing it within a few days. I mean, come on, this is September 2003, not 2004! Nobody's gonna remember Congress fixing its mistakes when the elections are over a year away.

WTF d00d? Did they also legalize drugs and a stoned-out-of-its-gourd Congress just forget to put it in the Record? Did terrorists put LSD in the Congressional water supply? KGB Agents under deep cover flipping all the calendars a year ahead in every office? A sudden attack of civic conscience? Just what the hell is going on on Capitol Hill, and is there any way of continuing it?

Shocked

[grasshoppa]

Wait, my government went against a bussiness interest for the sake of the people?

They did a good thing?

I take back some of the bad things I have said about them. Now if only they could continue this trend...think about it...RIAA ruled unconstitutional, it's members shot. MS seperated into many different companies, forced to develop OSS.

How warm and fuzzy..

[grub]

"Fifty million Americans can't be wrong."

Unless those same 50 million people are using P2P software.

Re:How warm and fuzzy..

[Arcturax]

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.

"Fifty million Americans can't be wrong"

[jamie]

And sixty million Americans are using peer-to-peer file sharing.

I posted my incisive and witty commentary on this matter of vital national importance earlier this afternoon.

Democracy

[WindBourne]

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.

Re:Democracy

[nate1138]

While I agree that is a stupid thing to have said, I believe what was meant was more along the lines of "Fifty million Americans have told us what they want, so we're gonna listen, and do it quick"

Now if only they cared so much about the opinion of the 50+ million that believe filesharing is OK.

Re:Democracy

[gantzm]

That's why it's a Constitutional Republic and not a Democracy. Don't they teach anything in schools anymore?

Re:Regulations

[eln]

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.

*AAAAARRRGGGGGH*

[indros13]

Inigo: "Do you hear that Fezzik? That is the sound of ultimate suffering. My heart made that sound when the six-fingered man killed my father. The Man in Black makes it now."

Fezzik: "Actually, it seems to be coming from the direction of the Direct Marketing Association Washington offices..."

The fallacy of their argument...

[airrage]

I cannot stand bad thinking. And bad thinking is just what the Telemarketers are engaged in when they argue that the DNC list will cost jobs.

They could make an arguemnt for free-speech. I say the could make it (without me laughing), but I will disagree in the end with that one too.

But as for jobs -- it will actually make the telemarketer MORE money -- if there are less telemarketers! The current game plan is simply to call everyone on the planet from the time they are born until the time they die like every second of every day. I would suggest that TARGETED, AGREED, and WARRANTED solicition will result in a lower-cost of SALES OVERHEAD than currently spamming everyone on the plantet, with the same rate of success!

Of course, the telephone companies sit quietly in a corner and pout as it was their corner upon which the pimp was solicting his wares.

I would love to wake up in an opt-in world, but until that day I have to have some way to say, "No, I don't want a year's subscription to volvo-hotrod magazine.".

Peace Out.

West has behaved correctly throughout this

[PhoenixRising]

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.

Where do they come from?

[Gonoff]

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...

Quickly?

[BoomerSooner]

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.

Re:What about that judge

[jgardn]

The judge didn't overturn a law written in congress and signed by the president. The ujudge overturned regulation implemented by the FTC because he felt that the FTC had no authority to do what it did, but the FCC could've done it. The FTC claimed that a small section of last year's budget provided them with the authority to do what they did.

So with congress passing this bill, and the president signing it, the case becomes pointless.

So many errors, where do I start...

[MyNameIsFred]

...It's clear that the F.T.C. has been engaging in regulatory imperialism and ruled outside it's area....

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.

...milions of lost jobs in an important industry...

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.

...thats capiatalism you know...

But that is laisse faire captialism, which we don't have in this country.

Re:Regulations

[YrWrstNtmr]

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.

Lost jobs

[Synn]

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.

Finally, success in the war on terror

[kaltkalt]

The DMA, our worst domestic terror organization, has finally been stifled thanks to the bipartisan efforts of congress. Hopefully its 5,000 members can now be captured, tarred and feather, and executed. We truly are winning the war on terror.

He's the defender of nothing, just a contrarian

[gad_zuki!]

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.

The telemarketers sure screwed themselves.

[MisterFancypants]

This is even worse than what the RIAA did to themselves with lawsuits.

A mere couple weeks ago I was somewhat surprised how few people I know in real life have heard of the Do Not Call list until I told them about it. Now that the telemarketing companies won a court decision and forced Congress' hand, the news (TV, newspaper, Internet) has been abuzz with this story.

So now instead of losing out on 50 million people, most of which one would assume are very ANTI-telemarketing and extremely unlikely to buy anything from them anyway, the industry will probably lose many millions more who didn't even know about the list until it hit front pages everywhere in the nation, thanks to the court ruling.

So now when the list DOES go into effect, and it will since the ruling was just a temporary setback, the industry will probably have doubled the names on the list simply by bringing the existence of it to the national forefront with their stupid lawsuits.

Way to go telemarketers! Keep up the good work!

A haiku

[blackmonday]

ring ring ring who's there?
opted out, why a call this evening?
Mexico, you have phone too