| Comment Number: | OL-108960 |
| Received: | 12/9/2004 2:30:39 PM |
| Organization: | |
| Commenter: | Bruce Watson |
| State: | IA |
| Subject: | Trade Regulation Rule on Telemarketing Sales |
| Title: | Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Request for Comment |
| CFR Citation: | 16 CFR Part 310 |
| No Attachments |
Comments:
The do not call list was a step in the right direction. The safe harbor exceptions to the do not call list for charities and those with an established business relationship already create an irritating volume of intrusive telemarketing calls to our home. Please do not increase the number of calls we receive in our home by expanding the safe harbor exceptions to include pre-recorded voice messages. Receiving a call form a live person is irritating enough. I find receiving a pre-recorded call offensive. If someone wants to call me up and try to sell me something, they better do it in person. I do not want to run to the telephone to be confronted with a recording. I find this to be rude and inconsiderate. The telephone is for conversing with another human being, not for invading my home with inexpensive advertising. If someone wants to use my telephone for cheap advertising, then they should have to pay me for the privilege and inconvenience it causes me and my family. Due to the inexpensive nature of sending pre-recorded voice messages, I would expect the volume of calls would dramatically increase from the already irritating volume of calls if pre-recorded were permitted. One can simply look at the volume of pre-recorded political messages sent during the 2004 presidential election for evidence of this. As for the call abandonment safe harbor, this safe harbor provision should, in my opinion, be eliminated entirely in the case of abandoning calls answered when dialing multiple numbers at once. What could be ruder and more inconsiderate than hanging up on someone who has just rushed to the telephone to answer a call? The fact that I may have inconvenienced and harried myself to attempt to answer a telephone call, and that call is automatically abandoned by a telemarketer's computer just as I pick up the telephone is simply infuriating!! Why should a telemarketer be allowed to dial more numbers and aggravate and inconvenience more of us at a faster rate than they could otherwise, just to enable them to make a few more bucks? When they abandon an answered call the telemarketers are growing richer at the expense of their own customers' time and inconvenience. This practice is particularly heinous when multiple telephone numbers are dialed at one time, and when one number answers the others are abandoned just at the moment in time when someone is likely to be answering their phone. This multiple simultaneous call and abandonment practice should be criminalized, and this comment comes from a smaller and less intrusive government is better conservative republican.