This Presidents' Day, if you're an American, you can thank George W. Bush for at least one thing: on Friday, the President signed into law new legislation which will make the national Do Not Call registry even better. No one likes phone spam, and the DNCR is doing a great job of curtailing it. Yet, the DNCR did have some flaws, and in a rare case of Washington harmony, all parties came together to fix the most pressing problems.

The big kahuna was a ticking clock on original DNCR registrations from users like you and me. When the DNCR was launched in 2003, it was launched with a five-year "reset" policy for any registered number. This meant that, according to the original rules, had you signed up in 2003, sometime in 2008 you'd be removed from the list whether you liked it or not. You could always sign up again, but it's a hassle that no one (save perhaps telemarketers) thought was fair. Reacting to consumer and congressional concern that a "reset" was both unnecessary and unfair to consumers, the FTC already agreed to suspend the removal of any registered users until Congress and the President could consider the matter. It didn't make sense to start resetting user's registry entries if there was a chance the policy would be chucked out the window.

The House and the Senate approved their own versions of DNCR bills last month (S.781 and H.R. 3541), which were combined for the President's signature. In particular, it was the Do-Not-Call Improvement Act of 2007 (H.R. 3541, the Senate counterpart was S.2096) that did away with the automatically-expiring registrations.

To appease telemarketers, the new law requires that the FTC "periodically check telephone numbers registered" on the list and remove any that have been disconnected or have been reassigned. The FTC is tasked with working with phone companies in particular to make sure that the only numbers active in the list are those which belong to the person who submitted them. After a nine-month examination period, the FTC is to report to Congress on the effectiveness of such efforts to increase the "accuracy" of the DNCR.

Addendum: why I love the DNCR

My family recently moved into a new home, and with it, we received a new phone number (I didn't want a new one, but in Massachusetts they can be strict about towns and their exchanges). At our old house we had been covered by the DNCR, but at the new home, we weren't because we had a new number. It took one week, at most, before the unsolicited calls started. When they started, they were frequent and annoying. Life "off" the DNCR was horrible.

After about another week of putting up with it (it just sat on a long "to do list" as we attended to other move-in crises), we finally got around to signing up our new number, and even though the Registry gives ample time for opt-out information to be followed by telemarketers, in reality we were spam-call-free within a week. In short, the DNCR works, it's fast, and telemarketers are by and large obeying it when expected.