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Canada's Do-Not-Hesitate-To-Call List
An anonymous reader writes "The creation of a do-not-call list in Canada has run into
trouble. Michael Geist reports that the proposal has been effectively destroyed, with exceptions for just about every telemarketer including businesses, political parties, polling companies, and charities. The government committee apparently heard from the marketers but refused to listen to consumer groups."
In the U.S., the Do Not Call Registry was about as effective as well. The bosses signed up our business phone lines and nothing has really changed. We still get on average of 20-50 solicitation calls a day.
That doesn't sound like much, but for a small mom-n-pop ISP run by 4 guys and a dog with 2 phone lines, it's awful. Fwiw, we're all pretty good at screening calls via Caller ID.
Good luck to our fellow Canadian brethren, whether they've disowned us or not.
do() || do_not();
That's our Canadian government - always looking out for the little guys. Those much maligned mega marketers, the poorly pictured political parties and poll promulgators, the little lobbyests languishing in the face of previously proposed changes to our country's telecommunications laws.
What ever were we thinking in our attempts to wrest the right to remain "unlisted" and "untapped"?
How dare we expect to have the right to not be disturbed in the midst of our daily ablutions by the ring-ring-ringing of the telephone?
I am (almost) at a loss for words, but I'm certain that if I wait a bit, someone new will call me and try to sell me their own.
Sadly it appears that my government is no longer similar to the American's "of the people, by the people, for the people", but "to the people".
The article is gone, but if the businesses that are exempted are those with a pre-existing relationship with you, that would be the same as the American Do Not Call list.
just do what I did, and get cell plan where you get refund for received calls.
I've almost paid my last months phone bill, just by talking with telemarketers.
You can easily keep them talking for about 30 minutes by asking everything about the product they're selling.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Just be less polite. If everybody just hangs up on the marketeers once they start talking, it should stop fast enough (no income anymore=exit scheme, onto the next one: Pop-up and pop under adds, exit pages, etc EVIL LAUGH).
The marketeers are usually trying to be persistent by just saying things like: you don't know what I am going to offer.
If telemarketing anoys you, just hang up, do not even say goodbye anymore, you don't know them, you don't owe them, so what do you care.
Sofar my advice to make canadians less polite.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
The do-not-call-list has worked great for me. Since I signed up I have gotten zero telemarketers. Just a couple pollsters. After I got VoIP (kept my phone number), I started getting telemarketer calls again and i thought the do-not-call thing wasn't working. Then I learned that any time the service on a number is change in any way (such as going from POTS to VoIP) it gets removed from the list and you have to add it again. I added it again and the calls stopped.
I don't really know why your business is still getting calls. Are you getting called by telemarketers or just cold calls from B2B sales people? Perhaps they are calling one of the numbers in your hunt group and not your main number? Did you add ALL your businesses numbers to the list? Most businesses will have a group of numbers with one "main" number that autoforwards to a free line in a group.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
...is to figure out how to contact the Direct Marketing Association (or its Canuck equivalent; I forget its name) and get struck off the list.
I did this nearly a decade ago and I have *no telemarketing calls* save three local charities that aren't members of the DMA.
Unfortunately, I failed to save the information. I recall I obtained it by calling the telco and getting downright irate about the attempts by Sprint Cda to slam me into one of their plans. Somehow or other I finagled a phone number from the customer service rep...
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
> When fire becomes a financial burden, safety will go up.
You sicken me. To paraphrase you:
"Once enough people die, and its too expensive to pay out insurance claims, insurance companies will enforce stricter rules."
Once people die. You need people to die first before anybody does anything.
State regulations may be reactive to a certain extent, but not by design. Placing safety and health regulations in a freemarket requires human suffering by dresign before a market correction.
Your counter argument, which I know already is, so what, more people die under supposedly proactive government over regulation.
Which is a hypothesis, and not factual. Turning these things over to the free market is essentially saying, "Well, we're too dumb to know what works, but one thing we know for sure is if enough people die/getsick/getfucked, it'll become too expensive to maintain insurance."
Lets be honest here, you're talking about fire insurance payouts, but the money has to do with injuries/death in addition to simple property destruction. So you're suggesting a free market where the cost/revenue model is related to people dying.
Sick.
"Old man yells at systemd"
The problem faced by Canada and/or the USA is indicative of a more general (and therefore more difficult to solve) problem.
When a telemarketer calls you from your own country, both parties are governed by the same laws, however, many of those laws are ineffective when the caller and recipient are in different countries.
With cheap telecommunications international telemarketing is becoming more common, and consumer protection is beginning to suffer.
Take, for example, the recent spate of calls that have originated in Florida, and targetted North-West Europe. Each of these European countries has a national do-not-call list, yet international telemarketers are ignoring these lists, believing themselves to be untouchable.
It's become so bad that "the Consumer Ombudsmen from the Nordic Countries of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland have contacted the US Federal Trade Commission and cited concerns over some international business practices" [1][2]
The letter itself cites concerns over both telemarketing and general internet marketing, and illustrates that once national boundaries are crossed, the temptation to increase sales (possibly by misrpresenting the goods that are being sold) may be more than some telemarketers (or telemarketing company managers) can bear.
What is needed is a global agreement on Do-Not-Call lists. Without such an agreement, national lists will be entirely irrelevant as each company conscientiously respects it's own citizens whilst mercilessly telespamming the rest of the world.
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