Department of Consumer Affairs

The California Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) contends that, as a result of abuses by marketers, "the home telephone with its accompanying white pages listing is becoming an endangered species." It urges the Commission to adopt carefully crafted rules to protect consumers.

It probably is not sufficient to state, without more, that the "error rate" should be zero. In practice, there is always some delay in responding after a called party answers a marketer's call. The key issue is what delay (measured by seconds or milliseconds) is permissible before the machine-caller responds. Without some standard, there may be no change in the actual practices of some marketers, who may contend that an operator is "available" but first must respond to others who have answered, resulting in indeterminate delays. To deal with foreseeable evasions of that kind, the rules might state that once the called party answers the telephone, a live operator must respond with a human, non-recorded, non-machine-generated voice within two seconds. (DCA Comments, at 2.)

DCA suggests that records be maintained in a form suitable for introduction as evidence in criminal and civil law enforcement proceedings without further foundation. To enhance enforcement of the rules, the department also proposes that reported data include actual telephone numbers and locations from which machine-dialed calls originate along with the names and addresses of the owners of the firms that generate the calls.

DCA also asks the Commission to consider how, if at all, the rules might facilitate do-not-call procedures under both federal law and the yet-to-be-launched California do-not-call process. Since machine-generated calls will violate do-not-call prohibitions unless they are programmed to exclude calls to prohibited numbers, and since they are also likely to give rise to numerous do-not-call requests, DCA suggests that the Commission require operators to report their procedures for honoring do-not-call requests and excluding prohibited calls.