TheAgitator.com
Telemarketing, Ct’d
Sunday, August 24th, 2003For those of you who aren’t yet bored to do death with the subject, I’m taking an absolute beating in the ol’ blogosphere over my position on telemarketing. Daniel Drezner responds here. And you can read the pissed off responses to the original piece by scrolling down to the “Feedback” section here (one guy attempted to post my home address and telephone number. Classy. Both are wrong, incidentally). And more from Julian here.
I do get a nice defense from Joanne McNeil here.
A few more points, then I’ll shut up:
1) I’m still not sure how libertarians can justify invoking the federal government to force someone else to use their own property (those who actually own the phone lines, poles, switchboards, etc.) to deliver telephone service to you on your terms. Seems like a significant interference with freedom of contract to me. It also sounds like the libertarian right has just ascribed to a federal right (for a fee) to commercial-free telephone service, to be provided by private telephone service companies.
2) I’m still not sure why libertarians think this will actually work. Joanne points out even more loopholes in the law than I found. And we all know the track record of federal bureaucracies. Why does anyone think the FTC will run the federal list any better than the private do not call lists are run?
3) Lots of people pointed out to me that the reason I don’t get telemarketing calls on my cell phone is because there’s a federal regulation against it. True. Sort of. There’s a federal law against using automated dialing systems to call cell phone numbers. But there’s no law against your cell service provider selling your number to telemarketers. And there shouldn’t be.
Why not?
Because these are terms you should negotiate into your contract for service.
What if, for example, your cell service provider (or your land service provider, for that matter) offered a plan in which you paid lower rates for phone service in exchange for allowing your number to be sold from time to time, and thus enduring a few telemarketing calls per week?
Shouldn’t you and your provider be free to negotiate such a contract? Might this be a way to allow folks on tight budgets to get cell service?
I’m guessing this is why the regulation applied only to automated dialers, but from the tone of the messages I got, lots of people out there would be happy to apply the law across the board — no telemarketing calls to cell numbers, ever.
This of course is beside the original point. But many wrote to point out that telemarketers are prohibited from calling cell phone numbers, which isn’t entirely true.
One other thing: Even the regulation against automated number-dialing of cell numbers is going to get mucked up. A recent federal “portability” law now forces phone service providers — cell phone and land line — to allow you to keep your phone number if you switch cell service companies, or if you switch from a land line to a cell phone. In the past, telemarketers had two distinct libraries of numbers — land line numbers, which they could call; and cell phone numbers, which they couldn’t.
After the portability law, lots of numbers that were formerly land lines will soon become cell numbers, making the two regulations almost impossible to comply with simultaneously.
UPDATE: Will Baude is on my side. Robert Tagorda is not. And Tyler Cowen was kind enough to draw attention to the piece, but doesn’t take an explicit position.
Libertarian smackdown
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…
I’m still not sure how libertarians can justify invoking the federal government to force someone else to use their own property (those who actually own the phone lines, poles, switchboards, etc.) to deliver telephone service to you on your terms.
I don’t get it. What, exactly, is it that the federal government is forcing telephone service providers to do? Phone companies have always taken the position that thier job begins and ends at making the phone system work. Who calls whom and what they say is beyond the scope of their contract.
If a customer declines the Do-Not-Call list, nothing has changed, right? And if they sign up for it, the phone company has to do….what???
I could understand your point if the DNC required the phone carriers to enforce it, but it doesn’t.
It’s like saying that settting a highway speed limit changes the contract between the consumer and the auto company that provides the car. Whaaaaa?
Why does anyone think the FTC will run the federal list any better than the private do not call lists are run?
Private lists are voluntary. Sorry to use the car analogy again, but volintary speed limits don’t work. Capice?
My quesion to you: Are you intentionally writing ridiculous bullshit to increase traffic to your site? Or are you really this dense?
Clem,
Why such bile? Did a telemarketer kill your pa?
If you want to have a discussion, let’s have one. But if your only reason to venture over to my site was to make two lame points and then attack me personally, you’ve really done little more than make yourself look foolish.
Didn’t you get your licks in over at Drezner’s site? Let’s debate like grown-ups. Otherwise, I’d invite you to go elsewhere.
As for your two points:
1) The Do Not Call List prevents private telephone companies from selling numbers to telemarketing firms. At the very least, it diminishes the value of those contracts.
It also creates a federal right to commercial-free phone service. As someone who believes in federalism, I have a problem with that. It is an affirmative right. I don’t believe in affirmative rights.
2) Actually, voluntary speed limits do work, better in fact than enforced speed limits. We have speed limits now. How many people do you know who always drive the speed limit? How many people do you know who ever drive exactly at or below the speed limit?
Accident fatality rates fell across the country after the ‘94 Republican Congress relaxed the 55 mph speed limit requirements. And Montana, which has no speed limit at all, has one of the best traffic records in the country.
Speed limits don’t stop people from speeding. Nor do they make the streets safer. They’re revenue generators for city and state governments. Nothing more. They’re completely arbitrary. Check out the National Motorists Association for the numbers to back this up. They’ll tell you that our roads are designed knowing that people speed. They’re designed to facilitate speeding. If everyone drove the speed limit, we’d have gridlock.
As for your general point — that federal coercion works better than voluntarism — I guess I’d merely point you to a couple thousand years of human history for evidence to the contrary. It’s also a dangerous idea. Why not just have the federal government dictate via fiat all behavior it desires from the private sector?
The DMA list has worked pretty well. Not perfect. But given all else the federal government does so well (that’s sarcasm), and given all the loopholes in this law, you’re awfully naive if you think the FTC is going to manage its list any better.
Radley, it’s an “affirmative right” in the exact same way any other property right is an “affirmative right” as enforced by the government against third parties. Laws against other trespasses create the same sort of “affirmative rights.”
Much as I like much of libertarianism, I am often struck by the apparent fact that more than a few self-styled libertarians apparently believe that the world began yesterday. The fact is that the feds established the DNC regulations in large part because telemarketers had been insufferable to more than a few people for more than a few years. So much so that more than a few people refused to answer their phones. Calling at all hours of the late afternoon and evening. And so forth.
So the feds instituted the DNC regulations.
What I find most disturbing about the pro-DNC argument is they really can’t see the difference between land that you own (that “no soliciations” sign again) and an interconnected network. Their position is frighteningly tech-phobic and anti-innovation. This is a lesson in why we need to get the goverment out of telecom, not why it needs to get back in.
Solveig Singleton the director of Tech at CEI, has written a few op-eds about this that I suggest everyone read.
Radley, Montana USED to have a speed limit that was “reasonable and prudent” by days but with a specific numerical limit at nights. That was dumped. Now the highways have posted speed limits like everywhere else.
Stop the speed limit argument now. That’s ludicrous. The government setting standards to protect kids in school zones and motorists on highways is just a tiny bit different than them “protecting” us from mere annoyances to your ear.
Why are you guys such whiners? Screen your calls yourself, or just pick up the phone and tell them not to call back. I guarantee that the same people complaining about this above are the ones that listen to the telemarketer’s full speech, the rebuttal, and the closing b/c they don’t have the nuts to just say hey, quit f****** calling and leave me alone.
Travis - I generally tell telemarketers to not call me, sometimes f’ing with them by telling them that whoever they’re calling for (me, or my mrs.) is not home and I don’t know when they’ll be back because I’m just a burglar. But despite this fun, I love the idea of a DNC list. Why should I be forced to get up and answer my phone at all? By signing up for the DNC list, I’m merely declining any solicitations ahead of time, saving myself the time to answer the phone and the telemarketer the time and expense of calling me just to get told no.
There was a time I might have agreed to just talk to telemarketers so they could place me on their DNC list.
That was before they started using recordings that couldn’t be talked to for just this purpose. And they started outsourcing to foreign countries, but there’s no real practical way to deal with THAT…
I propose that there are to be no land lines on the island. We’ll avoid this whole mess.
Where’s Jim? Tell him I need one of those coconut phones.
My whole problem with telemarketers is that I have to pay money each month just to have my phone turned on. So I am paying the phone company for them to possibly sell my name or, as another alternative, for a third party to come across my name and number and have access to me who may then sell my name to another third party.
I quote the eloquent uh_clem when I say, “Whaaaa?”
I think a telemarketer should defer some of my cost of having that phone if they want to call me and pitch some product or service. I will gladly accept their calls to alleviate my bills. If I routinely decline to purchase, let that be part of my permanent record and eventually the telemarketers will stop calling.
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