ScottSevener.com

One of the stories that caught my eye this week that I found kind of interesting was a debate over whether Congress should lift a ban allowing companies to auto-dial cell phone users, mostly for telemarketing purposes although there’s debate over whether it could flow into other arenas such as collections and pretty much any avenue where companies have computers do the dialing instead of representatives doing it themselves.

And I know that it’s not going to be a popular opinion, but I’m actually ok with this.

People have always been touchy about getting calls on their cell phones, dating way back to when we only had 100 minute plans and they still costed upwards of $50/month!  What’s weird is that despite getting better plans – I’ve got one of Verizon’s smallest family plans and we still didn’t go through half of our minutes due to Mobile-to-Mobile ratings, etc… – not to mention the fact that more and more households are either switching from their landline phones over to VoIP or even just dropping them altogether in favor of going entirely wireless, folks still get really bent out of shape when they receive unsolicited calls on their mobile … as if it’s costing them $2.95/minute or something.

I guess my thing is, in this day and age when wireless technologies are dwarfing those of yesteryear, I just don’t think it’s fair to stonewall businesses by telling them that there’s just no way to reach their customers via voice if they don’t have a dated landline phone.  Also, lest we not forget – many companies are already doing it anyways because I don’t know about your experience, but mine has sure proven that Do Not Call List to be just about useless and filing a “complaint” with the FCC does little more than get you a 15-page “incident report” in your mailbox a month after “reporting a violator.”

What needs to happen is two-fold – first, this silly ban on calling cell phones should be lifted because like most laws, only the good guys are following it anyways.  Then for part two, cell phone carriers need to adopt better policies for allowing customers to blacklist offending numbers who continually harass them, much like most VoIP providers let their customers do today.  I used to get all sorts of solicitation calls on the VoIP line that now serves as our home phone until one lazy afternoon I downloaded a history of all our incoming calls for the last couple of months and just starting banning them left and right when I found that they were calling at all hours of the day…

Now of course, that’s not to say that every consumer is going to be as initiated or tech savvy to go through all of that, which is why you build up a repository much like most decent e-mail providers (like Gmail) do for filtering spam – rules are built by various complaints flagged by thousands of users, and as a result millions enjoy the benefits of a shared blacklist of businesses who do more harm than good with their auto-dialers.

I think it’s a solution where both parties need to meet in the middle – consumers need to admit that cell phones aren’t any more “special” than landline phones anymore, and likewise businesses must understand that if these legal floodgates are opened, they’re going to find their calls never going through just like the billions of pieces of spam that fallout long before reaching an end user’s mailbox if they don’t act responsibly.

This thing is getting kind of ugly…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buovLQ9qyWQ

And only two weeks after Iraq vet Scott Olsen was hit in the face by a tear gas canister at Occupy Oakland,  it’s troublesome not only to see the violent direction that the movement has taken, but even more so to realize that these are all police-initiated actions, not scenes where protesters themselves were violent and put the local law enforcement officials’ lives in danger. It’s very clear that the local officials are becoming increasingly frustrated with these protests that are now going on 2 months in dozens of communities around the country, but not for nothing, these people wouldn’t be out in the streets protesting for months on end if they weren’t frustrated with something themselves!

It also brings to light a particular growing concern of mine, in that although American citizens all have “the right to peacefully protest,” many eccentricities about local ordinances and zoning laws have shown their faces with regards to Occupy Wall Street and it leads you to sadly have to ask the question, “Ok, so we have the right to protest … but where?” Occupiers in Zuccotti Park in New York City have been able to set up camp the legal gray area of privately owned public space, although recently things have gotten more strict as items like tents and generators were deemed to be fire hazards and ordered to be removed.

Others not necessarily participating in the actual protest have cited complaints about not being able to make use of Zuccotti Park themselves, thus raising the question of when does one individual’s right to use of a public space override another’s.

In my mind, the answer is fairly simple – this is the reason why we have true public spaces, and in the case of a long-standing event like the Occupy protests, if both parties can’t physically exist in the same space then priority goes to the vocal majority. Because the thing is, like it or not, this is a big deal, and if some citizens are going to complain about being “inconvenienced” by these protesters, then when their numbers grow to be larger than the protests themselves, then they get the soap box to speak their own voice. Until then, the one currently speaking happens to be pretty loud, and it would be a shame to see them quarantined off onto some side street, conveniently far from the very people who they are protesting, simply because we happen to have some local rules in place that seem to undermine the very freedoms that we’re so proud of here in America.

But as for the violence, such actions by the police in self defense might admittedly be warranted, but so far that’s never been the case. Violence for the sake of stifling the voice of these protests only helps to amplify their cause even louder as the machine at work attempting to silence the call of the people makes its ugly face known to the masses. Violence rarely gains sympathy, and these protesters seem more than willing to endure its wrath in the name of their cause.