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Mr. MARKEY.

Mr. Speaker, today I am pleased to be introducing the Telephone Advertising Consumer Rights Act, a bill created to free individuals and businesses from the often intrusive, costly, even dangerous consequences of unsolicited telephone advertising.

Today's advances in telecommunications technology have spawned an exciting array of new products and services that have improved our quality of life-via the telephone. Individuals and businesses are equally empowered by an ever increasing number of highly efficient communications pathways and once unimaginable access to information.

However, these new technologies equally empower both ethical and irresponsible users. Consequently, the tremendous benefits stemming from ethical applications of modern telecommunications may-unless prohibited-offset by the intrusive, sometimes dangerous, costly detriments of irresponsible applications. From this dichotomy, emerges the need to protect the consumer from the undesirable intrusions and potentially adverse consequences of unethical applications of modern telecommunications technology.

The Telephone Advertising Consumer Rights Act provides an electronic database mechanism through which objecting individuals and business subscribers can free themselves from unwanted telephone solicitations, including solicitations using facsimile machines and automatic telephone dialing systems.

The telephone is an insistent master-when it rings, we answer it-and many consumers complain bitterly that, when it rings to deliver unsolicited advertising, it is invading their privacy. Likewise, businesses, dependent on their telephone lines to carry the words, data, and images that are so essential to the success of their enterprise, have come to decry the cost and interference with business activities of some forms of unsolicited advertising.

In recent years, a growing number of telephone solicitors have started to use automatic dialing systems. Each of these machines can automatically dial up to 1,000 phones per day to deliver a prerecorded message. According to industry officials each day they are used by more than 180,000 solicitors to call more than 7 million Americans. Unfortunately, these machines are often programmed to dial sequentially whole blocks of numbers, including hospitals, fire stations, pagers, and unlisted numbers.

This not only makes the machine an equal opportunity nuisance, but an equal opportunity hazard, particularly in instances where the machine is not capable of releasing the called party's line once they hang up.

Facsimile technology has also gained popularity for delivering unsolicited advertising. An office oddity a few years ago, the fax machine has rapidly become an office necessity in my office and more than 2 million others, delivering more than 30 billion pages of material each year. But, with the growth in fax machine numbers has come junk fax, the electronic equivalent of junk mail. When this nuisance first emerged, the Washington Post reported, " receiving a junk fax is like getting junk mail with the postage due." Succinctly put, using a facsimile machine to send unsolicited advertising not only shifts costs from the advertiser to the recipient, but keeps an important business machine from being used for its intended purpose.

This bill, which I have introduced with the ranking minority member of the subcommittee, Mr. RINALDO, is a bipartisan effort to return a measure of control to consumers over what they hear and read. I would especially like to commend Representative RINALDO and the minority staff for the cooperative spirit with which this bill has been crafted.

This bill will not eliminate unsolicited telephone advertising, for certainly we must acknowledge that telephone solicitation, when conducted properly, is an established, lawful marketing practice. But this bill will give consumers a mechanism to specify that they do not want to receive unsolicited advertising and require advertisers to honor that choice. 

In addition, the bill will eliminate unsolicited calls to emergency and public safety telephone numbers and to paging and cellular equipment. The legislation, which covers both intrastate and interstate unsolicited calls, will establish Federal guidelines that will fill the regulatory gap due to differences in Federal and State telemarketing regulations. This will give advertisers a single set of ground rules and prevent them from falling through the cracks between Federal and State statutes. It will also guide responsible development of fledgling industries unable to police themselves and provide assistance to States in regulating intrastate telemarketing abuses. 

I urge my colleagues to support this legislation, not as a burden on legitimate businesses, but as an affirmation that unwanted intrusions into the American home and workplace are objectionable and should be restricted.

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