It's a Start

But only a start.

The FCC has placed further restrictions on robo-calling:

Those aggravating automated telemarketing calls will be interrupting your dinner a lot less often.

After receiving thousands of complaints from consumers, the Federal Communications Commission clamped down Wednesday on unwanted robo-calling by approving sweeping changes to its telemarketing rules for wireline and mobile phones.

Even with the national Do Not Call Registry in effect — the initial effort to block those pesky calls — telemarketers have found ways around the rules. But the FCC's latest effort is "closing a loophole," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center.

"This is an important step forward to make it easier for consumers to take advantage of the Do Not Call list," Rotenberg said about the FCC's changes. "These are additional safeguards to provide consumers greater protection."

Telemarketing calls have a bigger effect on mobile phones, he noted, because those calls can eat up the minutes in consumers' wireless plans.

Under the new FCC rules, telemarketers are required to obtain written consent, which can be in the form of an online approval, before placing autodialed or prerecorded calls to a consumer.

Telemarketers also must provide an automated opt-out mechanism during each robo-call so that consumers can immediately tell the telemarketer to stop calling.

The FCC also eliminated the "established business relationship" exception, which had allowed robo-calls to be placed to the land-line home phones of consumers with "prior or existing" associations with companies represented by telemarketers.

And the agency strictly limited the number of abandoned or so-called dead-air calls — in which consumers answer their phones and hear nothing — that telemarketers can make within each calling campaign.

The exemptions are still more than I would like to see, the exemption for non-oprofits, allows them to contract out to for-profit telemarketing firms, for example, but it's a positive development.