| Comment Number: | OL-104734 |
| Received: | 11/29/2004 5:23:38 PM |
| Organization: | |
| Commenter: | Thrasher |
| State: | VA |
| Subject: | Trade Regulation Rule on Telemarketing Sales |
| Title: | Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Request for Comment |
| CFR Citation: | 16 CFR Part 310 |
| No Attachments |
Comments:
Dear FTC: I am currently a consumer of both a land-line and a wireless telephone. I pay quite a price for both of these services, and I pay again in state and federal taxes on these phones. Since this is my consumer dollar being spent, I am very much in favor of the rules that have been put in place to limit direct marketing calls. Before the do-not-call registry my family had caller id and call block to limit calls, and even strongly considered cancelling our land line phone just to avoid harrassing phone calls from unsolicited marketers. To me, it does not matter if the phone call is a recorded message or not, the fact that it is unsolicited means I don't want to receive it on the phone line I pay for. For those companies that I have a business relationship with, when called I would like to speak to an individual who allows me to opt off of their list. As an example, prior to the DNC registry I had a credit card company who called and dumped me to pre-recorded messages. Since I was never able to tell the company to leave me off their calling list, I cancelled the credit card. This action took considerable amount of time on my part, and I was quite angry at the company for requiring so much of my time just to get control of my phone back. I fear that if machine-answer is allowed and becomes more widespread it will make it difficult for consumers to choose to do business with companies who don't conduct electronic dialing of their customers. My free time is very precious, at the current economics it is very cheap for a company to interrupt me with their sales pitch and very expensive for me to stop the distraction. Please keep the current restrictions in place, they have the right amount of checks and balances to allow companies that need to contact me to do so, and those who only want to market to consider strongly the cost-benefit.