Wrong Number!' Can You Control Who Calls Your Telephone?

• Date: 01 April 2024

TECHNOLOGY “Wrong Number!” Can You Control Who Calls Your Telephone? By John M. McNichols, Litigation News Associate Editor hose of us who grew up in the last century may recall the time when telemarketers began to replace teenagers as the most likely cause of telephonic interruptions during the family dinner hour. A mild nuisance at irst, telemarketing became a national concern once automatic dialing technology emerged in the 1980s, exponentially increasing the volume of calls that households received. Telemarketing calls had become so prevalent and ubiquitous by 1991 that the federal government got involved, restricting and even prohibiting certain forms of electronic communication, steps that ultimately led to the federal Do Not Call Registry and various state-level analogues. Nevertheless, despite widespread agreement about the unwelcome nature of telemarketing, the road to the national Do Not Call list was a long and winding one, and numerous loopholes remain. Telemarketing companies have pushed back hard, challenging the authority of federal regulators and vigorously asserting the First Amendment protections afforded to commercial speech. Nonproit telemarketers have been similarly vigilant and are subject to fewer restrictions than their for-proit counterparts. As a result, telemarketing remains as common today as it was 30 years ago when the irst anti-tele-marketing laws were passed, notwithstanding the rise of the internet as an alternative mode of electronic outreach. What Is Telemarketing? As its name suggests, “telemarketing” refers to retailer-initiated, direct-to-consumer marketing using the telephone. SPRING 2024 VOL . 49 NO. 3 Sometimes, telemarketers call consumers based on previous expressions of interest. But telemarketing’s most infamous incarnation is the “cold call,” an unsolicited inquiry in which the caller has no preexisting reason to think that the consumer may be interested in the caller’s product or service. Although the idea of reaching consumers by telephone has been around as long as the telephone itself, the utility of telemarketing was long limited by technological factors, in particular the relatively low number of American households with dedicated lines. That changed gradually but profoundly between 1960 and 1980, as individual lines replaced party lines and automated switchboards replaced manual ones, eliminating the need for human operators and enabling faster connections. But the real breakthrough in telemarketing...