A wondrously deafening silence

Disconnected call

From the Center for Democracy and Technology:

The House today approved, by unanimous voice vote, legislation that permanently prevents consumer’s phone numbers from being automatically removed from the FTC’s “Do Not Call” list. Without the legislation, those numbers would be scrubbed from the list after five years. CDT supports the elimination of the five year expiration rule. A companion bill in the Senate is waiting for a floor vote. The House bill is H.R.3541; the Senate bill is S.2096

(This was actually posted by CDT on the 11th when it actually happened. I’m slow.)

Hopefully the Senate will have the sense to do the obvious, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to poke your Senatoid (for those in the U.S.) just in case.

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2 thoughts on “A wondrously deafening silence”

  1. I can see why scrubbing phone numbers after five years might be useful, since people do not generally call the do-not-call maintenance line and remove their number when they stop using a particular number. Having an address set that non-decreasingly increases towards holding its entire address space seems somewhat pointless to me.

    Better would be to simply acknowledge this effect and ban unsolicited telephone advertisements altogether. That, or have the DNC list be informed by the telcos when a number gets recycled to another user.

  2. I think this could effectively amount to eventually blocking the whole space, but in my universe that would probably be a good thing :-). It’s possible that a “backdoor” block like this was more politically palatable than overtly disallowing all telemarketing.

    I guess the real issue is how much telemarketers care; if it’s really worth something to them, they could presumably encourage (or even pay) telcos to ensure that recycled numbers get reported. If, on the other hand, they’re all just moving on to on-line spamming…

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