Will we have to bomb India to stop telemarkerters?

[stevebody]

Sorry in advance. Probably no one will read this, anyway, so I'm going to just vent as briefly as possible:

Agree 100% with Roberto: Nuke the Buggers. WHY in the name of Yaweh should I have to pay $7 a month - or seven cents - to stop someone from committing an invasion of my privacy? As far as I'm concerned, someone showing up unbidden in my email or on my phone line is the same as them showing up in my living room. The ONLY THING thing that a person owns completely is their name, and the phone company sells that off to anybody with two bucks and a business license. I've harangued Qwest mercilessly about this when the telemarketing calls have gotten out of hand and their response is that there's nothing they can do because it's legal. My position is that THEY are the ones who sell off call lists, WITHOUT my permission or even my knowledge, so THEY should be the ones I call, ONCE, to get the calls blocked. According to a friend of mine at Microsoft, the technology to do this already exists and it is as simple as requiring anyone registered as a telemarketer or email solicitor to attach an electronic identifier to their calls or emails. Phones that don't allow such calls or email programs that are blocked would simply end transmission. He says it's not prohibitively expensive and could be up and running in a month or two, IF qwest would do it. The problem, as always, is money. The phone companies make millions off selling us out to these leeches and it wouldn't do to have the seller start tampering with their list-buyers' "rights".

The simple solution is to just make ALL this crap illegal, across the board. YES, by damnit, Boycott Cingular and every other company that finds clever little ways to circumvent existing laws. That's what will happen if we get our Washington legislation passed, BTW. There is an initiative being circulated to outlaw email spamming and impose heavy fines on repeat violators but what will happen is that these scum will just base their marketing schemes outside the US and let the issue of jurisdiction become the Mommy's Skirt behind which they do business.

Look at the sheer volume of CRAP with which we're inundated DAILY: spam, telemarketing calls, junk mail, not to mention the unrelenting barrage of aural and visual advertising on busses, buildings, taxis, billboards, radio, TV, MOVIE previews, even on the videotapes we purchase. Companies that do this justify it by saying that this is the engine that runs the economy and, without it, business would be impossible.

Baloney.

What would happen is that product quality and price would determine who stays in the marketplace and who folds, which is how it should be, anyway. It would cripple the middle-man culture and somebody tell me how that's an inherently bad thing.

I will gladly lick stamps, man phones, lobby in Olympia - or DC, for that matter - with anyone who promises a concerted effort to rid our culture of this verbal and visual garbage. The very fact that people keep telling me that I NEED to do ANYTHING to stop it infuriates me. I didn't START it. I didn't ask anyone to sell me their crap. If I need anything in our society, I'll find it. For me to have to waste ten seconds opting out of this effluvia is absurd. This sort of marketing doesn't have to cease altogether but it should ALL be opt-in. Period.