A House committee has agreed to debate a bill to lift the ban placed on the ability of telephone companies to make customer cold calls.
The House State Affairs Committee introduced the bill Thursday and sent it to the Business Committee for review.
The bill is being pushed by Minnesota-based Frontier Communications and Louisiana-based Century Link Inc. The companies say a 2000 law to end cold calls to customers and create a "Do Not Call" list hampers their ability to market new services to new customers.
Yeah, that's the entire fucking point, dipshit.
What kind of argument is that? You don’t have a right to market your products by any means necessary!
The company I work for is one of the entities pushing this bill. They’ve been hitting up all the employees to join their PAC, offering prizes and shit for signing up. Fuck them. I’ll do my job; the executives can worry about the regulatory landscape.
Yes, I’m an employee whose livelihood is affected by what affects the company. I’m also a citizen and a consumer who wants all corporations to play by fair rules. The latter is far more important.
Working for a phone company is great in a lot of ways. I’d say it fits in with the notion of right livelihood — the company isn’t making weapons, or pouring toxins into rivers, or paying slave wages in third world countries, and for the most part is providing a service people need without openly ripping them off. But it’s still a huge corporation out for its own bottom line, and the larger this one grows, the worse it gets.
Corporate America seems a little bit too powerful from where I’m sitting.
We have DNC laws in the UK but people flout them all the time and I guess the regulator either isn’t powerful or motivated enough to actually do anything about it. It’s got much worse in the last 12 months for some reason and nearly all the calls originate in India. If I could block all calls from India to any of my phones then I would. Problem solved. Sadly, when calls arrive it just displays as an international number. British Telecom could fix this of course – but they won’t as they have outsourced thousands of UK jobs to India over the years.
Junk SMS is also annoying and on the rise. ‘Text STOP if you no longer want to receive these messages’. Yeh, right. If I reply you’ll just send even more crap knowing the number is valid. And valid phone numbers sell for a lot of money.