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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.
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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".
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.
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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