The 'do not call' law of 1991 needs updating

How’d your day start?  Mine started like every other day lately: typing “STOP” into the dialog box in my text messages app more than a dozen times.

The same could be said for the subject line of a dozen reply emails, but the cause/campaign emails are somehow less obnoxious because (here’s a great life hack) I long ago sequestered one friends/family email (which I never ever use to fill out forms) from the one catch-all email I designated for exactly that purpose so on that one email, I get all kinds of junk. 

So I’m less prickly about the emails, though what I am about to propose for the texts could and should include them for the rest of you who haven’t adopted such a system. (Parenthetically, I cannot recommend Proton mail highly enough for your friends/family email. I have no interest in it of any kind. It’s just a solid, spam-free email.)

I’ve told multiple congressmen to STOP multiple times only to have them show right back up the next morning! 

And it’s still ongoing.

How? The problem, I can only conclude, is burner numbers.  The STOP message works only on the number you are replying to.  And no humans are involved on the back end; it’s all automatic.  So unless someone, an actual person, in the congressman’s office is keeping a do not SEND list, you’re simply telling them to get lost on this one burner number, but then they get another, and another, and another.  It’s obviously (obvious to me anyway) a purposeful work-around, and frankly a pernicious abuse and it’s really got to stop.

Most of us remember with relief that “congress passed the Telephone Consumer Protection Act in 1991 in response to consumer concerns about the growing number of unsolicited telephone marketing calls to [our] homes and the increasing use of automated and prerecorded messages.”  This birthed the “DO NOT CALL” registry where you could enter your phone number and be relieved of the infernal things.  It’s the rare unicorn among federal consumer initiatives which has, largely, worked very well.

I’ve got good news — and bad news:  the DO NOT CALL registry does allow you to enter a complaint about receiving unwanted texts on your cell phone.  That’s the good news.  The bad news?  It’s a backward-looking arrangement like in your congressmen’s office:  the system doesn’t want your number.  They want every number of every offending spammer.  Then … they’ll do something with them … maybe.

Ugh.

So obviously we need the DO NOT CALL registry updated to make YOUR cell phone number as verboten, not simply have you spend an hour a day, every day cataloguing the dozen+ of incoming which it asks for now, which requires you to fill out the same form (with a dozen questions), one spammer at a time.

Talk about a truly terrible time ROI! (Return on investment.)

We didn’t have texting in 1991.  We do now.  This law needs to be updated to reflect that and we all would do well to contact our legislators and ask them nicely to amend it.  Of course, we need to be cognizant of the fact that we’re asking them to stop using a fundraising tool which they believe benefits them, so it’s incumbent upon us to take a multi-pronged approach to get satisfaction.

So off to the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) it is!  Happily, we have a new president and on January 20th he appointed a new FTC commissioner, one Andrew N. Ferguson, who may very well be amenable to expanding the DO NOT CALL list administratively to include cell phone numbers which are so heavily abused in spam texts. 

Once we’ve got his attention, perhaps we could get him to expand it further to include DO NOT EMAIL where we could register our email address as well.  It’s a big ask, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

Commissioner Ferguson can receive your polite request via 1-877-FTC-HELP (382-4357).  The FTC writ-large is also on X:  @FTC.  Finally, snail mail can be sent to:

Federal Trade Commission
600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20580

Should you decide to snail mail your legislators, do be sure to cc: the FTC (or vice-versa) so everybody knows we’re serious.

One more idea — and this is definitely pushing it — an argument could be made that updating the DO NOT CALL list to include all digital communications via cell phone could — could — fall under the purview of the president, as it is he who decides the contours and priorities of how existing law should be enforced, and it’s worth a shot to see if this could be done via Executive Order, so contacting President Trump or any one of his surrogates probably wouldn’t be a bad thing…

I understand this violates every conservative impulse against expanding the federal footprint in our lives, but I got over it pretty quick when I remembered they’ve got all our cell phone numbers anyway, via malign actors or breaches or any number of other digital cracks in the damn, so why not yank some of that power back by making them, preferably by force of law, stop bothering us!? 

I, for one, would love to have something other than daily rounds of cutting and pasting “STOP” every morning with my coffee, and I’m guessing you would too!

Image: RawPixel // CCO public domain

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