Regulators are considering whether to ban these messages. They have been hearing from ringless voice mail providers and pro-business groups, which argue that these messages should not qualify as calls and, therefore, should be exempt from consumer protection laws that ban similar types of telephone marketing.
But consumer advocates, technology experts, people who have been inundated with these calls and the lawyers representing them say such an exemption would open the floodgates. Consumers’ voice mail boxes would be clogged with automated messages, they say, making it challenging to unearth important calls, whether they are from an elderly mother’s nursing home or a child’s school.
If unregulated, ringless voice mail messages “will likely overwhelm consumers’ voice mail systems and consumers will have no way to limit, control or stop these messages,” Margot Freeman Saunders, senior counsel at the National Consumer Law Center, wrote in the organization’s comment letter to the Federal Communications Commission on behalf of more than a dozen consumer groups. “Debt collectors could potentially hijack a consumer’s voice mail with collection messages.”
Consumer advocates and other experts argue that the courts and the F.C.C. have already established that technology similar to ringless voice mail — which delivered mass automated texts to cellphones — was deemed the same as calls and was covered by the consumer protection law.
“These companies are only spinning an incorrect interpretation of the regulations and the definition of the word ‘call,’” said Randall Snyder, a telecommunications engineering consultant and expert witness in more than 100 cases involving related regulations.
“Definitions of words in regulations and statutes are legal issues,” he said, “but there is certainly lots of common sense here.”
