Federal Trade Commission commissioners voted unanimously 5-0 last week to require that telemarketers update or "scrub" their Do Not Call Registry list every 31 days instead of quarterly.

That reduces from three months to 31 days the amount of time a consumer must wait after entering his or her telephone number on the Do Not Call Registry to complain about a company the consumer believes is violating the law.

The FTC says nearly 58.5 million phone numbers have been placed on the Do Not Call Registry which opened on Oct. 1 2003. The FTC expects at least 60 million to eventually sign up.

The federal registry allows anyone to include their telephone number on a list that's sold to telemarketers, most of whom must then not call those numbers for five years. Exempted are charities, pollsters and political campaign callers, as well as companies that have recently done business with someone on the list. Violators can be fined $11,000 for each illegal call.

Anyone can relist their telephone numbers with the registry at the end of five years.

For now, the FTC ruling, effective Jan. 1, 2005, only applies to interstate telemarketers -- those who make calls outside the originating state -- but the Federal Communications Commission, which enforces Do Not Call regulations for intrastate calls, will likely make the same amendment to its rules for the sake of uniformity.

The FTC says telemarketers are largely complying with the Do Not Call regulations and it issued citations, but not fines, to only eight companies, at least seven of them to mortgage finance firms.

Consumers say they are otherwise satisfied with the new law.

Two recent surveys, a Harris Interactive poll and an Associated Press-Ipsos poll, both say the majority of consumers who signed up with the Do Not Call Registry now experience far fewer telemarketing calls.

The Do Not Call Registry law also received the blessings of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver when it ruled Feb. 17 that telemarketers do not have a First Amendment right to call consumers with sales pitches when that right supersedes consumers' right to privacy, invoked after they've indicated they don't want to be phone pitched.

Published: April 1, 2004

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Broderick Perkins parlayed a career in old-school journalism into a contemporary digital news service that really hits home. The award-winning consumer journalist, originally from Wilmington, DE, is founder, publisher and executive editor of the bootstrap DeadlineNews Group, a Silicon Valley-based editorial content and consulting service specializing in residential real estate, consumer news and related editorial consulting services. The DeadlineNews Group includes the website, DeadlineNews.com, offering real estate editorial content and consulting services, and its back shop, the Deadline Newsroom, an open house on news that really hits home. Perkins obtained his formal journalism education from University of Delaware and a journalism boot camp, the Institute of Journalism Education at the University of California-Berkeley. He went on to 20 years of service as a daily newspaper journalist at the Wilmington, DE News Journal and San Jose, CA Mercury News. Perkins covered housing on the San Jose Mercury News reporting team which earned a General News Reporting Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. He has also produced real estate, consumer and small business content for the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, RealtyTimes.com, Nolo.com, Better Homes and Gardens, the National Association of Realtors, Homestore/Move and Intuit/Quicken among more than three dozen publications. In addition to managing the DeadlineNews Group, Perkins most recently served as chief editorial consultant for Nolo's Essential Guide To Buying Your First Home, Nolo, and writes real estate television scripts for RealtyTimes.com.