Article
US cold callers face bleak future
The US telemarketing industry is making dire predictions after almost 17m Americans rushed to add their names to a register in little over a week aimed at preventing cold callers from plaguing them at home.
The federal trade commission, the US communications watchdog, is predicting that up to 60m phone numbers will be added to the list by the end of the year, reflecting the deep resentment that many consumers feel toward the industry. There are about 166m residential telephone numbers in the US and people are continuing to sign up at a rate of 158 a second.
The introduction of the service had to be staggered across the country for fear that the hotline and website set up could crash due to the heavy traffic.
The US Direct Marketing Association forecasts that the register could cut in half the $100bn (£60bn) annual sales from telemarketing and potentially lead to two million job losses, in an industry that employs just over four million.
Louis Mastria, a DMA spokesman, said the industry feared that the government was victimising it. "Clearly the attendant publicity concerns us because people think the government is criminalising the industry."
He added that 66 million consumers had bought from telemarketers calling them at home.
The US list follows the example of the Telephone Preference Service, set up in Britain in 1999, which has more than three million people registered.
The US government is also intensifying the battle against "spam" - unsolicited emails that are increasingly clogging up inboxes and were cited recently by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates as the chief obstacle to the development of the internet. Executives from Amazon.com, America Online and the FTC are due to testify before a Washington hearing tomorrow aimed at establishing tougher legislation on spam.