February 16, 2012

The FCC Cracks Down on Those F*$%#! Robocallers

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Here is today’s installment of “Government Bureaucrats Working To Make Your Life Better.” Seriously. Behold the latest rule from the FCC:

After receiving thousands of complaints from consumers, the Federal Communications Commission clamped down Wednesday on unwanted robo-calling by approving sweeping changes to its telemarketing rules for wireline and mobile phones.

….Under the new FCC rules, telemarketers are required to obtain written consent, which can be in the form of an online approval, before placing autodialed or prerecorded calls to a consumer. Telemarketers also must provide an automated opt-out mechanism during each robo-call so that consumers can immediately tell the telemarketer to stop calling.

The FCC also eliminated the “established business relationship” exception, which had allowed robo-calls to be placed to the land-line home phones of consumers with “prior or existing” associations with companies represented by telemarketers.

I’m especially thrilled about the last bit. If my dentist (or whoever) wants to call to tell me something genuine (don’t forget your checkup tomorrow!), that’s fine. But if they just want to harass me endlessly with robocalls to sell me more stuff (we’re having a sale on tooth whitening!) then forget it. That’s an ordinary commercial telemarketing call and I want it stopped regardless of whether I happen to have set foot in their establishment before.

I have my doubts about how many robocallers actually care about the FCC’s rules, but I’m sure at least some of them do, and thus my life will be made ever so slightly better. So hooray for the FCC. These are your bureaucrats watching out for you.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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