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Mon. Sep 29, 2003

Our Founding Telemarketers

Our Founding Telemarketers – From USA Today: ”The FTC lost a crucial battle Thursday, when U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham found that the registry violates telemarketers’ free-speech rights—by allowing charities and politicians to make calls while discriminating against for-profit businesses.”

The judge says you can’t treat people differently based on the types of speech they engage in when they call you. The judge says that’s a violation of the First Amendment, at least, if you get the government to help you do it. And the judge didn’t leave a phone number where we can contact him to engage in the freedom of speech he wants to guarantee (thus, I’ve been censored!).

Now, I have every right to shut off my phone completely. Unplug it. Or I can hang up on any person who calls, solely based on the the type of speech they engage in. Apparently I can do things with my phone that the government can’t.

Like willingly sign it up for a freakin’ No Call list, along with 50 million others.

That was an independent action by this individual, requesting the government to perform a service. The government is not imposing this solution on every phone in the country, just on those belonging to the 50 million Americans who went out of their way to sign up on the list.

So who exactly is being denied freedom of speech? I’m paying for a service, my phone line, which I intend to use however I see fit. I am not required to provide that means for a vendor to contact me. It doesn’t offer them a free megaphone to my ear, they still have to pay someone to deliver the message to me.

Just as they would have to pay to deliver their message to me on a billboard. Or a radio commercial. Or the junk mail in my USPS mailbox. Those things all cost them money, not me.

This judge seems to be saying they have a right to use my services to contact me, even if I had only put in a phone to talk to dear old Mom and Dad, and call 911.

Now, on those grounds, nothing is safe. You pay for your e-mail account. Vendors send you Spam, which everyone hates, and agrees is well on the way to destroying the medium of e-mail. The basic argument has always been, ”I pay for that service, you don’t, so you don’t get to use it for unsolicited advertising.”

This judge is saying that if you accept an e-mail from dear old Mom and Dad, you also have to accept them from Viagra peddlers. And if the government were to create a ”Do Not Spam” list, it would violate the First Amendment.

I am an ardent Constitutionalist. I want no real limits placed on our freedom of speech. But I don’t think our Founding Fathers added that clause to protect fly-by-night vendors selling bogus means of Penis enlargment by e-mail, or the lady on the phone who keeps trying to sign me up for a ”free” trip to Florida. Freedom of speech was a right created to make sure the people wouldn’t have to suffer silently under the oppression of an unjust government, not to ensure that we would have to suffer under the unjust oppression of telemarketers interrupting dinner.

Freedom of speech does not mean you have a right to unimpeded access in every medium and means of communication. You cannot stand in the Capitol Rotunda with a megaphone, and try to peddle porn. That medium is denied to you, yet your right to sell porn is not. If you are deprived of just one specific method of contact, yet have hundreds of other options, that does not mean you’ve been censored.

You can’t pay someone to call me to sell something, but you can pay someone to mail me a brochure (you might even have to hire a photographer). You can pay someone to design and buy billboard space. You can pay someone to write a commerical and put it on radio or TV. You have hundreds of methods to reach me. I want to deny you the one that’s in my living room, the one that I pay for, and unfortunately, I can’t do it all on my own. It requires a larger effort, one that is voluntary, yet has teeth. Consequences.

That’s why I made a choice to be on that No Call list. I made a choice about how I want the services I pay for to be used. A judge is now denying me that choice. Where do I go to sue him for the resulting loss of control over my personal property, my phone line? What is that guy’s phone number?

Some of the telemarketers say they will honor the list starting October 1, despite its limbo status: ”’Although we believe this is an inappropriate role for the government, we dont want to catch the American consumer in our crossfire,’ [Direct Marketing Association President H. Robert] Wientzen said. ’We believe we should honor their wishes.’”

Wow, the telemarketers seem to understand the wishes of the people a lot better than that judge. All I can say is that the first telemarketer that calls next month is going to get a quick earful. It may be time to go buy that air horn.