Washington Post - The Republican National Committee is backing a petition that would allow political campaigns and businesses to leave automated messages on your voicemail, without your phone having to ring. Under consideration by the Federal Communications Commission, which has been asked to review ringless voicemail, the proposal would free telemarketers from restrictions that prevent them from robo-calling people's cellphones without first getting their permission.
For the RNC, which filed comments in support of the petition to the FCC last week, regulations designed to limit straight-to-voicemail messaging would hinder free speech, and raise constitutional questions about the rights of political organizations. Supporters of so-called ringless voicemail don't see them as robocalls or "calls" at all. "Direct-to-voicemail technology permits a voice message to go directly to the intended recipient’s mobile voicemail via a server-to-server communication, without a call being made to the recipient’s telephone number and without a charge," wrote the RNC.
But a host of consumer groups see the petition as an intrusive work-around, designed to skirt the law and the requirement to receive a consumers' consent. "Americans are already fed up with unwanted calls to their cellphones, which have become increasingly common in recent years," Maureen Mahoney, a policy analyst for the advocacy group Consumers Union, said in a statement Thursday. "The FCC shouldn't make this problem even worse by weakening consumer protections and opening the door to unwanted voicemail messages from telemarketers and debt collectors."
2 comments:
And of course, retrieving the pile of messages will impose a data burden that customers end up paying for, so what could possibly go wrong with that? Let them do it, I say. Let them push this to the brink where folks might stop believing the idiocy that regulation of commerce is bad and that a so-called 'free market' is the answer to everything.
I agree, 12:45
I've been sharing this justice quote for decades, but people seem impervious to the message so far. Personally, I think USA is already unteachable/unreachable, the citizens seem to actually abhor justice and eschew response ability - but hey that's no reason to stop trying to fight the fog when everybody's everything is on the line, eh?
"Trade is a social act. Whoever undertakes to sell any description of any goods to the public, does what affects the interest of other persons, and of society in general; and thus his conduct, in principal, comes within the jurisdiction of society." -John Stuart Mill
Post a Comment