To all of you touting “do not call” lists, I will tell you the same thing I said for years, with greater and greater degrees of frustration during all those years I was an anti-spam crusader: OPT-OUT IS NOT A SOLUTION and NEVER WILL BE.
First of all, who is going to administrate this? Even assuming you can create a massive list of the 99.9% of people who do not wish to be bothered, what agency is going to foot the bill for maintaining and – more importantly – enforcing such a list? Why am I required to engage in effort to remove myself from lists I never asked to be on to begin with? What is to prevent unscrupulous advertisers (that is, all of them) from using the do-not-call list as a convenient list of phone numbers (or email addresses) for spamming?
Furthermore, supposing a list could be created, maintained, and enforced for the United States; what’s to prevent them from calling from Kanada? Will you be forced to remove yourself from an ever-lengthening list of registries stretching from the Cayman Islands to Sealand?
You pay for your phone. You pay for your Internet access. You pay for your domicile’s front door. You allow strangers access to these things in good faith, with the assumption that people who utilize your phone, Internet bandwidth, and front door do so with your desires and needs in mind. These advertisers are like the people who take all the “free samples” in supermarkets and make a meal of them, or piss all over toilet seat in public bathrooms and then take a big shit in the middle of the floor because, hey, they don’t have to clean it. Spammers are stealing from you, no different than if they reached into your pocket and took money from it.
Do police maintain a do-not-rob list? Is there a do-not-rape list where you must enter your personal information if you do not wish to be regarded as perfectly amenable to being raped by strangers on the street? No. The assumption is that people, by default, do not wish to be harmed or stolen from. The ONLY reason that spamming is acceptable right now is that the politicians who made the decision were bought. Openly and blatantly. In the US, the senate committee which was responsible for deciding spam was an honest business practice received sizable contributions from the Direct Marketing Association. This is all on record for anyone who wishes to check for themselves. And during the senate hearings into spamming, the spammers all showed up in expensive three piece suits and shiny black wingtips. The anti-spam advocates showed up in old jeans and Linux t-shirts and (according to the media present) smelled like old cheese.
I have long advocated the use of direct action against spammers. They are sociopaths who do not understand the difference between right and wrong. Indeed, they are physically incapable of being made to understand. They understand one thing only, and that is superior force. If the law will not stop them, then it is our duty, as citizens, to do whatever is needful to MAKE them stop.
