| Comment Number: | OL-105957 |
| Received: | 12/5/2004 2:10:13 PM |
| Organization: | |
| Commenter: | Winger |
| State: | CA |
| Subject: | Trade Regulation Rule on Telemarketing Sales |
| Title: | Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Request for Comment |
| CFR Citation: | 16 CFR Part 310 |
| No Attachments |
Comments:
If I have chosen to add my phone number to the Do Not Call Registry to deter living, breathing persons from annoying me with sales pitches for time shares, disability insurance, phone service, etc., etc. ad nauseum, why on Earth would I ever choose to receive such "calls" from a computer? Just so some jerk in Orange County can resume the standard of living to which he had become accustomed? Why not use tax dollars to buy the turkey off and program his computer to call his own phone 24 hours a day until he lands in the looney bin where he belongs? If telemarketers pay for the medium they use to distribute their drivel, then they may claim the right to assail the public with their unwanted pitches for products which I will refuse to purchase. However, I have never known a telemarketer to pay my phone bill or otherwise support the infrastructure which they so casually exploit to violate my privacy deliberately. Just like junk mail distributors and spammers these "businesses" are parasites that leech resources from existing networks for which they accept no financial responsibity whatsover. What then gives these freeloaders the right to impose their "service" on unsuspecting consumers whose only preexisting relationship with a company consists of the decision to purchase a particular product? The only serious consideration this proposal should receive is if the telemarketers are compelled to identify themselves and their corporate sponsors by name at the very outset of every unsolicited phone message so that the discriminating consumer has the opportunity to take his business to some other company that considers its customers an asset in the business rather than the financial sense. In this way consumers will have the power to vote with their pocketbooks, and these unwanted "voice mail broadcasters" will eventually dry up and blow away. People who want to receive unsolicited commercial phone messages (SPAP) should have the opportunity to express their gullibility in the form of an opt-in list which will grant that single business entity the opporutnity to make any unwanted solicitations of that individual consumer. However, corporations understand that people will register for such opt-in lists in far fewer numbers than currently avail themselves of the opporunity to opt-out of unwanted sales pitches; and those business seek to pepetuate a system that places an unduly burdensome reponsibility on the consumer to divine the mechanism for extraction from each of the many solicitation lists containing his personal information. Until businesses accept the fact that PEOPLE DO NOT WANT TO BE BOTHERED AT HOME, we will continue to see corporations treating their customers like a common commodity.