TheAgitator.com
New Column
Thursday, August 7th, 2003I have a fairly niched piece up at Tech Central.
It’s on new FCC regulations that ban solicitous faxes. Actually, it’s not that niched at all. It affects pretty much anyone who sends a fax to someone else who isn’t expecting it.
And I use it to, again, decry the lawmaking powers Congress has delegated to regulatory agencies.
Public debate on such issues would be preferred, in nothing else, to limit draconian measures being imposed by some fat, sweaty, cross-eyed bureaucrat. However, fax blasting is a horrible waste of the receiver’s property and time. One could argue that it works i.e. it ultimately generates revenues otherwise it wouldn’t be done. But so does theft and no one likes that too much do they?
The cost of fax blasting is probably higher to the receiver than spam or other forms of unwanted communications.
The key is ‘unwanted’. If I want to receive junk-faxes, I’ll ask for it - it should be my choice not someone else’s.
Put in a different way, that fax machine is my property, the ink in it is my property and that paper is also my property. What inherent right does someone other than me have to use my property at will?
On telemarketing….’my time is my property, my phone line is my property etc, etc, etc….’
There’s a math problem. 4500 new regulations per year divided by the number of business days (well over 200) does not yield 300 new regulations per business day. However, 75000 pages of new regulations does yield about 300 _pages_ of new regulations each business day.
(I believe this is also what the original Cato report says as well.)
Right idea, wrong example, Radley. Why should I, as a fax machine owner, pay for someone else to advertise to me? The sender has a right to free speech, but that doesn’t mean I should pay for it with my paper/ink/line time, etc. The fax sender has no real interest in making sure I don’t get their junk-fax.
That being said, the new rule (as written by the FTC) stinks; the old one was fine.
And, yes, the regulatory agencies are out of control, no doubt about it.
Andy, if it were that big a deal, wouldn’t private companies have figured out a way to screen or interecept unidentified fax lines?
If regulators might sit on their hands until a market solution appears — if at all — we wouldn’t be in the mess that was so eloquently described by Radley
He’s 28 years old!
TheAgitator.com…
Unwanted fax lines? All it would take is for a company to have a bank of 100 non-sequential numbers and you would have no idea what to block. Plus, you would need to maintain a database of unwated fax numbers *ON YOUR FAX MACHINE* (can’t do this at the central office) and keep it up to date.
No, a market solution would develop a database of fax numbers with which a company has had prior correspondence. It would block or hold unidentified, unrequested fax numbers. No such product exists because the cost of ink/paper for a junk fax is close enough to zero. Companies will put up with minor inconviences. It’s not a *big deal* to the private sector, so why should the government get invlived?
I’m in a situation where I get unsolicited fax phone calls, but I have no fax machine. These calls arrive at all hours of the day and night. I’m often awakened in the early morning hours by these fax calls. I have no way, other than to go out and buy a fax machine, to determine who is sending them so I ask them to cease and desist. The phone company (Verizon) tells me that’s my only option.
I haven’t signed on to the “do not call” registry for telemarketing calls because I don’t believe in government regulation of communications (or anything else). But I have to tell you, I’ve reached the limit with these fax calls. Unless I can find an electronic device that can be attached to my phone and that can detect fax signals and then send some kind of electronic signal that destroys the sender’s equipment, I will welcome this regulation with open arms.
sounds like this is really aimed at putting small business even more securely on the endangered species list.a large private corporation can easily absorb the legal cost of an unwelcome fax but will drive small companies out of business-a small business is often dependent on word of mouth and small scale promotion for success-this is an extra insult to the small company.
I get an anonymous fax call about once every several weeks on a line that is on both a state-level AND federal-level no-call-registry list. I have caller ID and but the incoming call reads “unknown number” and the number is not given. Call-block doesn’t work; it’s activated but somehow the caller is circumventing it. I tried #69 after one of these calls, but it gives me a message saying the feature will not work on the last call. I tried #57 (call tracing) and it gave me largely the same message. I also found out that the police will not investigate unwanted fax calls. I could possibly block the incoming faxes using a Verizon feature called Call Intercept, forcing any caller with a caller-ID block to hit # and announce themselves before the call rings, however I can’t do that either, because my Taiwanese wife has many friends and family in Taiwan who don’t speak English and Verizon says the system may not work for them even if they did. My fax machine (which is not used for receiving faxes, only sending them; I use eFax.com to receive faxes) somehow picked up a couple of the faxes months ago, but I threw away the faxes before I realized I should be collecting them for evidence. Now, for some reason, the fax machine isn’t answering the fax call, but that’s a tech issue I will have to work out. Their faxed page is my only evidence, and the only thing I can try to use against them. The fax machine activity report on the last 50 calls received is blank, because the only faxes I ever received came from this solicitor, and they have somehow completely blocked their number. I do remember the fax I did print out had no number on the header or footer of the fax. But they are calling at 5:00 AM and waking up my newborn baby and I am pissed. Any advice is welcome.