I still have a landline phone which is on a recorder that tells the caller my email address, in case it is an old friend. My wife wants us to keep the landline because she believes it might work after an earthquake when cell phones won’t. The last big earthquake in Tokyo doesn’t support that theory. Two cell companies failed and one kept working as did the Internet connections.
The landline gets an endless stream of junk sales calls, often with a machine generated message. Increasingly my cell phone is getting these annoying calls. They often offer to take your number off their list, or give you that option when you call the number back. Don’t respond.
The same applies to the myriad emails I get that get through the spam filters. They offer to take you off their email spam list. Don’t respond.
The reason is: they are sending this junk to millions of phone numbers and email addresses of which a small fraction are real people with real numbers and email addresses. When we respond, they put us on a ‘known recipient’ list. So we get more junk. On your phone you can just block the number and on email you can put it in the spam box.
Ethics? Isn’t modern commerce being unethical by allowing these greedy spammers to intrude on our lives and waste our valuable time. Sometimes they interrupt something important that we are doing.
I don’t blame modern commerce. There are governmental barriers to simple market solutions.
In one recent regulatory hearing, I proposed that Verizon be allowed to sell its land lines to a separate new company on the condition that the new company build up a consumer created anti-spam network. No regulators expressed interest. The entire phone system is regulated by the government, so new businesses to block spamming have no chance in that environment.
On top of this the national Chambers of Commerce and similar federations protect the spammers, simply because they are businesses. Screw the Chambers. If this were an open market, rather than a government created monopoly, spammers and similar frauds would be insignificant.
Look at the Internet, I have spam blockers on my Google Chrome browsers and they work beautifully. The same with Google email. The open market can protect us from spammers and it does where the government doesn't meddle.
We are stuck on phones with spam because they are government regulated utilities. No ethics here. Just traditional crony politics.