Congressional hearing in 1991 shows focus on calls by telemarketers using predictive dialers.
10/29/2018 14:00
The discussion of the definition of predictive dialers and automatic telephone dialing systems (ATDS) has certainly increased in recent years after the Federal Communications Commission’s declaratory ruling and order on the TCPA; the landmark decision in ACA Int’l v. FCC; and activity following the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decision on interpretation of an ATDS in Marks v. Crunch San Diego, LLC.
However, some of those discussions go back even further according to a blog post from Artin Betpera, senior counsel at Womble Bond Dickinson.
In a review of comments submitted to the FCC, Betpera discovered that a U.S. Senate subcommittee supposedly discussed “predictive dialers” in 1991.
“This hearing was used to make the point that this technology was in existence at the time the TCPA was passed in 1992, and was therefore intended to be regulated by Congress,” according to Betpera. “So it turns out the commentators were right. Sort of. It’s true that ‘predictive dialers’ were mentioned, but not with respect to the functionality that is central [to] the question being considered by the FCC: the ability to dial from a list. Instead, the ‘predictive dialer’ functionalities that were addressed were: (1) dialing in advance of the ability of the telemarketer to take the call of the person who answers the phone; and (2) setting an abandonment rate.”
Betpera provides clips from the hearing in his blog post and notes testimony on dialing functions was specifically in reference to “dialing sequential numbers” by telemarketers.
The practice would dominate a network’s cellphone and pager lines.
“At the time this hearing took place, carriers were assigning large blocks of sequential numbers to cell phones and pagers. So when a telemarketer’s sequential number generator hit those blocks of numbers, it would literally tie up the entire network’s cell and pager lines, and shut down the entire service,” according to Betpera.
Overall, the historical hearing “supports the notion that Congress was intending to regulate a very specific type of device that had the capacity to randomly or sequentially generate telephone numbers to be dialed – not devices that dial from lists,” according to Betpera.
And, the focus was on telemarketing calls, not debt collection.
Read more analysis of the hearing from Betpera on the TCPAland website.