Tom’s Garage

Well, I registered (thanks for the deets Mom) my home phone today though the calls are not supposed to cease until October. I won’t hold my breath even then.

I wonder how effective this thing can be. There are a few industries which are exempt, like political calls. What!?! Hmmm, I wonder if Gray Davis would allow CitiBank to call on his behalf: “Hi, I’m calling on behalf of Gray Davis to find out if you are registered to vote. Did you know that you can take a CitiBank Visa card with you anywhere you go? Including polling places. With zero percent interest on new account transfers for one full year, you can vote at least once while paying no interest and no annual fee”. Or something like that.

Let’s not forget outsourcing telemarketing to foreign countries. With IP Telephony (‘phony’, how ironic) it would be trivial to have an office in Canada where you call in via IP and hop-off somewhere in the US. Unless we can now fine Canadians for violating our laws. The holes are endless and the result will be shipping jobs offshore. And this does not address those who just don’t care about the law and call anyways, blocking their number so the average “Joe” cannot track them down.

And finally, the fact that they force you to opt-out rather than opt-in is just another indication that there is very little intent to actually curb the sales calls. It might make things a bit more expensive for the big players but that would be all I expect to see accomplished.

I await and welcome my being proven wrong.

Tags: Main Page

This entry was posted by tom on Friday, June 27th, 2003 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.