The first round of comments have come in for the CRTC’s consultation on registering all telemarketers.
All of the major telephone companies have submitted a unified proposal that can’t be ignored. They want your kids to register and pay fees before calling to sell Uncle Bill a chocolate bar. They want your church auxiliary to register and pay a fee before calling members up to come to bingo night. They want political candidates to register and pay a fee before their campaigns.
Here is what the telcos said:
36. … The Companies submit that it would be preferable to establish distinct rules that require ALL telemarketers and clients of telemarketers to register with the National DNCL operator for the purposes of providing their contact information. This rule would be in addition to the rules established in Decision 2007-48 that compel non-exempt telemarketers to subscribe to the National DNCL. The Companies accordingly propose the following two new rules:
- A telemarketer shall not initiate a telemarketing telecommunication on its own behalf unless it has registered with the DNCL operator and has paid all applicable fees charged by the DNCL operator and the CRTC UTR complaints investigator delegate, as appropriate.
- A telemarketer shall not initiate a telemarketing telecommunication on behalf of a client unless that client has registered with the DNCL operator and has paid all applicable fees charged by the DNCL operator and the CRTC UTR complaints investigator delegate, as appropriate.
37. These rules would logically lead to two new potential types of violations: the failure to register with the DNCL operator and the failure to pay all applicable fees charged by the DNCL operator (including those assessed by the investigator-delegate). In each case, these violations would likely come to light in the course of an investigation of a UTR complaint and should be identified by the investigator-delegate to the Commission along with the results of its investigation of the complaint in question.
The CRTC has defined telemarketing telecommunications as: unsolicited telecommunications made for the purpose of selling or promoting a product or service or for the solicitation of money or money’s worth.
Your car dealer calling to remind you it’s time for an oil change? Telemarketing. The dry cleaner calling to ask if you want them to fix the cuff on that pair of pants you dropped off? Telemarketing. Dentist calls to remind you to come in for your appointment tomorrow? Yep.
The definition is broad enough to include too many calls from groups that are supposed to be exempted.
Parliament specifically exempted telemarketing calls made under certain circumstances. Such as an existing business relationship. Such as from a registered charity. Newspapers. Political parties.
These exemptions get thrown out under the proposed registration process. It sounds like another private copying collective. We’ll see collectors go through the yellow pages in order to collect registration fees. At risk of being hauled before a tribunal for “failure to pay all applicable fees charged by the DNCL operator”.
The kind of discretion that the investigator would have according to the telcos plan scares the closet civil libertarian in me. The investigator has an incentive to register as many groups as possible; to collect as many registration fees as possible.
It scares me to have investigators with the discretion to decide which church groups they will pursue, which clubs, which schools, which political parties merit further examination and harassment for failing to register before making a call.
It is disturbing to think that leading executives from all of the phone companies – most of them lawyers – were unanimous in proposing this kind of bureaucracy and these kinds of restrictions on free speech. Just read the signature page on their submission.
Their proposal should scare you too.