When you pay for phone servic, the phone company charges you based on its expected costs. Some of those costs (probably a pretty large amount, actually) vary with volume (volume capability, actually). When 50% of the volume is created by voice spam (telemarketers), they should bear 50% of the cost (of the costs that depend upon volume), but they don’t. I have to pay moree for the increased volume capability to carry that voice spam to me. It’s the same principle as with faxes… spam faxes is illegal because it costs the faxee money (for ink and paper).

Also, many telemarketers would disguise or block their ID or sometimes even claim to be someone else (both on the ID and in person) to get you to talk to them – that’s fraud.

Lawsuit: 1. proving this stuff in court would be nigh unto impossible (for one thing, most or all jurisdictions will throw out recordings unless you informed them that you are recording them…) 2. Um, if it’s fraud or theft (which it is), it is already illegal (and wrong, from a libertarian perspective), so laws to make that more clear (and easily enforcable) are just an update of existing law – criminal, not civil.

Oh, and the DMA DNCL is a joke. Don’t know where you live, etc, etc, but IME, it doesn’t help worth diddly.

Another company refused to take my phone number off of their records, even when I told them that I am not a customer and they are making unwelcome phone calls. They flat out hung up on me when I “refused”

“If someone flooded my comments box with ads, I’d turn the comments off, or block the IP addresses.”

You can’t do that will calls, so you need another kind of intervention than just your own or your ISP.

“If it was the same guy or the same company, and reached the point of harassment, I’d see if there were legal action I could take, just as you can do with harassing telemarketers”

Well I don’t know what instances you have there, but it’s very hard to bring a legal case against telemarketers, and the *principle* is wrong – you don’t give others free reign to abuse your paid services AND then you’re the one forced to start a legal suit. Their abuse should be made illegal from the start, and prosecuted by law. It’s not a case for you to prove they did wrong, but for them to abstain from doing so.

Privacy is not something to be left to legal suits to protect.

Same with telemarketing, only it happens by phone, not by email or web.

So, Radley, no, I havent proven your point, and *you* haven’t proven it either.

All you seem to do is denounce this do-not-call list as some sort of violation of libertarian principles of the free market, starting from that abstract idea, without considering the real case you’re talking about here.

-Lee

How are they robbing you of time? You are the one that _chose_ to answer the phone. The onus is on you.

“I just don’t answer the phone.”

-eric

Bingo.

I haven’t revceived a telemarketing call in more than two years. Why? Because I was on the DMA (Direct Marketing Association) Do Not Call List.

With a working privately run national do not call list already in existence, why in heavens name did we need a tax payer funded government one?

Radley Balko and Pejman Yousefzadeh have dueling articles in Tech Central Station over whether the Do Not Call registry — about which I’ve posted here — is consistent with the libertarian credo. Start off with Yousefzadeh’s original TCS essay. Then…

But robbing me of intangible resources (time) is ok.

Yeah good idea.

Thankfully I’m not in that position anymore, but it wasn’t long ago. Maybe 5 years or so ago.

“If you pay by the minute for cell phone service and telemarketers call without your permission (and without the permission of your service provider), then they’re robbing you of resources.”

So, presumably, this would apply to landline service as well, if it were paid for by the minute? Don’t some people in the US actually pay for landline service by the minute? I’m fairly sure it’s common in other countries to do so.

And you’ve proven my point. I *would* complain to my ISP if someone spammed my email account incessantly. And if my ISP or whoevenr is hosting my email account didn’t protect against viruses or outfit me with some decent anti-spam software, I’d switch ISPs.

I would not lobby the federal government for an anti-spam law or an anti-comment-spam law.

It’s so obvious telemarketers are those in the wrong and it’s got nothing to do with free market or libertarianism. You can’t take abstract principles and apply them regardless to a situation where the abuse is clear.

And James — even if it’s a different salesman every night, every one of those salesmen is ignoring your “no soliciting” sign. The issue is not harassment, it’s trespassing.

I think people who support this law are using principles that apply to a single individual or company (harassment) and wrongly expanding them to cover an entire group or industry.

If you put up a no soliciting sign on your door but I still come over every night for weeks and try to sell you Amway, surely you would say that I am harassing you. But if a different salesman from a different company came each night that would not be harassment.