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10th Circuit Says FTC Can Enforce Do Not Call

Posted by timothy on from the auto-reverse-billing-would-take-care-of-it dept.

TCPALaw writes "Reuters is reporting that the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals has just ruled that the FTC can go ahead with administration and enforcement of the national Do-Not-Call list, staying a lower court ruling that blocked the FTC from implementing the list. Now I can sue those pesky telemarketers .. I have already gotten 3 telemarketing calls to the phone number I put on the national list since the list went into effect." Reader jhlund1976 points to the court's decision itself. Note, as strredwolf does, that this only means the FTC can "run the registry while a challenge from telemarketers winds its way through the courts." Strredwolf also points to the all-knowing Google News link.

1 of 372 comments (clear)

  1. A few random thoughts.. by windows · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The telemarketing companies complain that the DNC list will severely harm their profits. But with some simple and rather obvious reasoning, it's very easy to dispute this claim.

    Consider this, if your number is on the DNC list, chances are you weren't likely to buy much from a telemarketer, anyways. What telemarketers assume is the 50 million numbers that are on the list would be every bit as likely to buy from them as the numbers not on the list. I think my scenario is more likely.

    I tend to think the people that haven't signed up to the DNC list either aren't really annoyed by telemarketers or they find some of the products useful and would buy from a telemarketer. There's also the people who don't know of the DNC list, but I doubt that accounts for very many people.

    So the real effect of this is the people who are willing to buy from the telemarketers are far less likely to sign up for the list.

    It was a wise webmaster who said, in response to some clients blocking their banner ads, that he doesn't care. If they block the banner ads, they probably wouldn't click or buy, anyway. It saves him bandwidth.

    Along the same lines as his argument, I'd argue that this actually makes telemarketing more efficient. You are more likely to sell your products to someone who would not sign up for the DNC list than to someone who would sign up for it.

    Another thing that really annoys me about telemarketers is when they call, they usually show up on my caller ID as UNAVAILABLE. The problem is there are also legitimate callers who show up the same. I think it needs to be mandatory that those conducting phone calls for the purpose of commercial activity (solicited or otherwise) should be required to display their number and business/name on the recipient's caller ID. This means if you're calling someone to try to sell them a product, you can't call anonymously, either.

    Even if the DNC list is overturned in court, my idea for requiring them to show their caller ID information is completely constitutional. And anyone who has a caller ID can simply not answer the phone if they don't wish to receive such calls.