DMA Lauds House Passage of Phone Marketing Bills

The Direct Marketing Association praised the House of Representatives Tuesday for passing two pieces of legislation governing the telemarketing National Do Not Call Registry.

If signed into law, the Do Not Call Improvement Act (H.R. 3541) would make registered numbers permanent on the Registry, while requiring the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to remove invalid numbers and report to Congress on their progress none months after enactment, according to the DMA.

A second measure, H.R. 2601, would reauthorize the FTC to administer the registry while capping the fees that marketers are required to pay to access the registry.

Launched in 2003, the Registry now contains more than 145 million telephone numbers. But nearly half of the registered numbers are unusable or redundant because of other laws and regulations that govern the use of phone numbers for business purposes, according to the DMA.

The FTC instituted the five-year expiration date of registered phone numbers during the rulemaking process as their only effective means of purging the list of unused and inaccurate numbers, the DMA noted.

Both bills passed on voice votes. They still need Senate approval.