FCC Approves Autodialer Ban - No Exemption for Polls

In the US, the FCC has approved proposals to restrict the use of autodiallers, which the Marketing Research Association (MRA) believes will 'seriously harm survey, opinion and marketing research conducted by phone'.

In more than an hour of statements about the new rules yesterday, the Commissioners made no reference to surveys or polls, despite previous legislation's acknowledgement of the legitimacy of survey research and the profession's separate treatment in TCPA legislation.

The proposals are designed to protect consumers from unwanted calls and spam text messages, and as passed will also allow telephone companies to go ahead with services that will allow customers to block 'robocalls' and unsolicited text messages.

The new rules, approved by a 3 to 2 vote along party lines, will lead to 'less accurate research results, higher costs, and more class action lawsuits' according to MRA lobbyist Howard Feinberg, who had objectedin particular to the vague language used by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, using the terminology 'unwanted calls', 'telemarketing calls' and 'robocalls' interchangeably, and the word 'robocall' when referring to a call made with an autodialer, even where a human continues the call as soon as the line rings.

The new rules define an autodialer as 'any technology with the capacity to dial random or sequential numbers' - which Republican Commissioner Michael O'Rielly says is 'so expansive that the FCC has to use rotary phones [pictured] as an example of technology that would not be covered because the modifications needed to make an autodialer would be too extensive'. Commissioner Ajit Pai, quoted on www.huffingtonpost.com , comments: 'After this order, each and every smartphone, tablet, VoIP phone, calling app, texting app, pretty much any phone that's not a rotary dial phone will be an automatic telephone dialing system. What does that mean in the real world? It means we're taking our focus off of telemarketing fraud and sweeping all kinds of legitimate phone calls within the TCPA'.