Yale law professor Ian Ayres contributed an Op-Ed to the NY Times: Dialing for Dollars, which proposes a market solution for the telemarketing problem.
This concept of “authorized intermediation” simplifies the government’s regulatory burden. The trade commission doesn’t have to decide what types of calls to connect; it can simply leave it to the marketplace to offer the kind of filters that families really want. Families would benefit by having greater control of a scarce resource: their privacy.
Ayres describes his proposal in greater detail in a 2003 article in the Yale Journal on Regulation, coauthored by Matthew Funk, Marketing Privacy: A Solution for the Blight of Telemarketing (and Spam and Junk Mail), 20 Yale J. on Reg. 77.
