No small irony here:
The home telephone numbers of 11 top executives of the Direct Marketing Association – which has waged a bitter court battle to kill a federal no-call list – are on the new registry, which would make them off-limits to those annoying sales calls.
The Courant found the DMA employees, and top executives from two large telemarketing companies, among the 50 million numbers on the Federal Trade Commission’s anti-telemarketing do-not-call list.
The DMA executives, some of whom admit they signed up to protect their own privacy, did so even as their organization waged a legal campaign to prevent federal regulators from blocking telemarketers’ calls to millions of other Americans.
Ha! You’d think when caught, the executives would simply fess up, but at least one simply dug his hole even deeper:
Jerry Cerasale, the DMA’s chief spokesman during the recent court battles, confirmed that his home number is on the FTC’s list. But he insisted that he did not register, and he said he does not believe that his wife signed up either.
“Somebody is obviously trying to embarrass me,” Cerasale said. “This is one of the reasons we’ve been against the Internet sign-up. Anybody could put your number on the list. I don’t know if the FTC has controls on this.”
Hours after Cerasale spoke to The Courant, a different DMA spokesman called the paper with another explanation.
Louis Mastria said some telemarketing industry insiders have put their home numbers on the list as an experiment, so they can judge for themselves whether it makes any “perceptible difference” in the number of sales calls they receive.
Right.
It doesn’t bode well for an industry when it’s own leaders implicitly concede that it’s practices are annoying.
Wasn’t the federal judge who struck down the law also on the list? Hypocrites!
I hadn’t heard that. But the judge’s is to rule on the law irrespective of his personal opinion of the litigants’ business. So I won’t hold that against him.