The Direct Mktg. Assn. (DMA) and Newspaper Assn. of America (NAA)...
The Direct Mktg. Assn. (DMA) and Newspaper Assn. of America (NAA) asked the FCC for a declaratory ruling that would get telemarketers off the hook for automated calls to numbers they didn’t know had been ported to cellphones. Their…
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petition last week sought a “wireless safe harbor” from the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) ban on autodialed telemarketing calls to wireless phones. DMA last fall raised concerns about how telemarketers could be notified when a wireline number changed to wireless after the Nov. 24 implementation of wireless local number portability in the top 100 markets. DMA and NAA told the FCC it had authority to create a safe harbor “essential in an age of wireline numbers’ being ported to wireless numbers.” The exemption would recognize “the technological steps that industry has taken to avoid placing autodialer calls to wireless numbers while allowing marketers time to suppress wireless numbers that have been ported from wireline numbers” without being penalized under the TCPA. DMA and NAA said the request didn’t cover the kind of “consent” a telemarketer must have obtained to call a landline number that later was ported to a wireless number: “The safe harbor issue arises only if consent has not been obtained.” DMA said that even with access to updated information from NeuStar on which wireline numbers had been ported to wireless, marketers couldn’t update their call lists instantly. “It is inevitable that somewhere between the time a number is ported and the time a marketer can update its calling lists a marketer will place an autodialed telemarketing call to the now-wireless number,” the petition said. “This exposes well- intentioned marketers who are using every method short of manual dialing to avoid calls to wireless numbers to thousands of potential lawsuits, as well as state and federal enforcement.” The groups said the wireless safe harbor could be modeled on the Do Not Call safe harbor provisions of the TCPA. They proposed that if a marketer adhered to procedures similar to that safe harbor -- including subscribing to a wireless suppression service and using a version of the data no more than 30 days old -- the company marketer wouldn’t face TCPA liability for erroneous calls to wireless numbers. “This 30-day time period is much shorter than the 3-month period for downloading updates to the National Do-Not-Call list and is consistent with the maximum time that is permitted to honor a company-specific do not call request,” the petition said.