I don’t mind commercials. I accept that the price of my
entertainment is approximately 8 minutes of advertising during any
given 30 minutes of viewing.
I don’t mind magazine ads. Commercials before movies
don’t bother me. I’m even okay with Web site banners
and pop up ads. I do have a problem with the aggressive ads that
infect your personal computer and randomly pop throughout the day
even when you’re not logged on, but your run-of-the-mill ads
for “spy cams” and other odd little gadgets don’t
bug me. I’d rather have a few seconds of inconvenience than
pay for each Web site I visit.
But I have never, not once, derived any value from a
telemarketer call. I have never bought the extra insurance from my
credit card company. I have never bought a magazine or newspaper
subscription from a cold call. I have never switched calling plans
or consolidated my debt. I have never accepted the
“free” four-day, three-night Orlando vacation.
So, believe me, I was one of the first people who signed up for
the national Do Not Call Registry.
And I was highly disturbed when U.S. District Judge Lee R. West
saw fit to put the registry on hold.
After reading the court order, however, I must sadly concede
that West has a point. Someone forgot to watch their “School
House Rocks.”
There is a whole complex system in place. Bills go before
Congress and eventually, possibly get passed into laws. They teach
classes on this kind of stuff. Apparently, the Federal Trade
Commission, the arbitrators of the happiness that is the national
Do Not Call Registry, forgot to enroll.
The question is not whether a national “do-not-call”
list is legal. It is. The 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act
expressly permitted the Federal Communications Commission to
compile and operate a national database of consumers who wished not
to receive telemarketing calls.
The FCC, however, chose not to establish a registry for a
variety of, I believe, ill-conceived reasons, which is where the
Federal Trade Commission comes in. In 1994, the Telemarketing and
Consumer Fraud and Abuse Prevention Act provided for the FTC to
create a set of rules by which the telemarketing industry would be
regulated ““ the Telemarketing Sales Rule.
And this is where it gets a bit fuzzy. The FTC created the TSR,
and in so doing gave themselves the right to create a do-not-call
registry in their effort to stop abusive telemarketing practices.
This past year, Congress passed H.R. Public Law 108-10 which
granted the FTC the ability to appropriate the “funds to
implement and enforce the provisions relating to the
“˜do-not-call’ registry” as defined in the
TSR.
But Congress never expressly granted the FTC the right to create
and operate the registry in the first place. They only ever gave
that right to the FCC.
There’s a bit of egg to go around.
And although this may seem like a thin technicality ““
permission to appropriate funds to enforce the registry seems
implicitly to grant permission actually to enforce it ““ there
is an argument to be made on the telemarketers’ side. Because
the jurisdiction is so ill defined, they cannot appropriately
respond to the new rules. They have requested that Congress specify
exactly which agency has jurisdiction and how, exactly, that agency
will be regulated. It is decidedly dangerous to allow any given
agency the ability to govern themselves.
Personally, I am disgusted to come down on the
telemarketers’ side in this argument. I have no doubt they
merely stumbled on a somewhat decent argument in their attempt to
block the registry from ever occurring. Case in point: all of their
other motions regarding the so-called illegality of the registry
were denied. It’s a bit like that episode of “The
Simpsons” when Homer starts a gossip Web page and
accidentally hits on some bizarre truth.
Which is why on Wednesday, within hours of the order coming
down, no less than 11 bills were introduced that would grant the
FTC authority to operate the Registry. By Thursday morning, the
House passed 412-8, one of those bills. I don’t remember the
last time our government moved so quickly and decisively.
Apparently, telemarketers have pissed off a lot of people.
It does make me wonder, however, about our national priorities.
Rep. Billy Tauzin commented on how quickly Congress could move when
50 million Americans were angry. Too bad we weren’t that
angry about, for example, our lack of a national health care system
or declining educational standards.
Sutton is a fourth-year classical studies student.