Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: jgro@apldbio.com (Jeremy Grodberg) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: House Approves Restrictions on Fax, Phone Junk Mail Message-ID: <10491@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 5 Aug 90 23:35:47 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Reply-To: Jeremy Grodberg Organization: TELECOM Digest Lines: 37 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 544, Message 7 of 11 In article <10307@accuvax.nwu.edu> telecom@eecs.nwu.edu (TELECOM Moderator) writes: >The United States House of Representatives approved a bill... >[which] would authorize the Federal >Communications Commission to set up a national registry of telephone >subscribers who object to unsolicited sales messages delivered orally >by a computer, or in printed form by a fax machine. >Solicitations by charitable, political and religious organizations >would be exempt from the ban. [...] To be an effective deterrent, this list of phone numbers would have to be public. I can just see it providing a national hit list for telemarketers working for "charitable, political and religious organizations." Who is going to want to give out their unlisted phone numbers for this, if it ends up *inviting* solicitations from every non-profit fundraiser in the country? I remember my training as a door-to-door political fundraiser (canvasser) that I was instructed to ignore "no solicitations" signs, because a) I wasn't selling anything, and b) those signs were put up by people with low sales resistance, and thus would be a better-than-average source of donations. Regardless of the accuracy of those justifications, I can tell you that they are widely held beliefs among sales pros. Isn't this list a formula for this kind of abuse? Jeremy Grodberg jgro@apldbio.com [Moderator's Note: Where you are missing the point is that the charitable, political and religious ones can call *anyway*. And the law is directed at automated dialing, a technique which does not rely on a printed list of numbers, but simply dials from 0001 to 9999 on each exchange. Everyone *except* the exempted categories would have to program their autodialers to skip the requested numbers. PT]