| Comment Number: | OL-101985 |
| Received: | 11/27/2004 8:15:00 PM |
| Organization: | Self |
| Commenter: | William Watkins |
| State: | CO |
| Subject: | Trade Regulation Rule on Telemarketing Sales |
| Title: | Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Request for Comment |
| CFR Citation: | 16 CFR Part 310 |
| No Attachments |
Comments:
Do not allow pre-recorded messages to be sent to "Do Not Call" listed phone numbers. This is absurb. During the recent elections I was getting 6 to 20 pre-recorded calls per day. This was a serious impact on my business as I need to be able to be contacted by my customers while needing quiet time to work. Jamming up my phone with junk is not appropriate. If you want to consider a change try removing political pre-recorded calls. This could help everybody. Do not call means "DO NOT CALL". I fail to see how advertising via phone directly to homes is benificial to legitimate business. Consider what has happened with eMail spam. Low cost to the sender has resulted in email jammed with fraudulent offers, and other illegal scams. Computerized dialing systems have now reduced the cost of compterized phone solictation to the same order of magnatude as bulk email. Do you really think that we should elect and appoint people that support the same sorts of abuses on phones that we have today on email. You may object that a previous business relationship exists preventing this kind of abuse. In reply consider that I've looked at thousands of catalogs and made price inquires over the years. All of these types of transactions can be considered as establishing a "relationship". This current exception has already openned my phone to hundreds of offers of "credit" from "VISA". Basically each new bank signs up to use the "VISA" relationship to push their credit card to existing customers that are "inactive". As it is I complain loudly about this abuse each time it occurs and do not wish to see further exceptions created. Lastly, the phone is the premier mechanism for dealing with emergencies at this time. Radio with automated stations and TV by satallite have rendered TV and radio in-effective for emergency notifications in many cases, (IE forest fires we get here in the west). To combat this we are spending lots of dollars on "reverse" 911 systems whose purpose is to generate reliable notifications to residents who are in danger due to flood, fire, or terrorist incident. Do we really want to cripple this capability by having people refusing to answer their phones as they are once again being bombarded by computer generated messages. Bill Watkins