1/ "It must cost a lot of money to make so many robocalls," someone asked me. "How can they afford to do it?" That's a really good question. The reality is that it costs almost nothing to do it, scamming you is profitable, and that is why people do it. Unroll and I'll explain.
I'm really okay with that, but I think it's false anyway for *legitimate* businesses. The relative cost to any business whose main activity is not calling people who did not consent to be called is irrelevant.
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VoIP rates below something like 1-2¢/min with a minimum of 5¢ or so per call do not benefit anyone except abusers. It's the same issue as USPS bulk mail discount rates. They benefit abusers not normal people & legit businesses.
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You realize that's the exact argument people have regularly made on charging all internet traffic per megabyte, right?
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"Oh no, internet got so cheap there's spam everywhere!" "The obvious fix is to make it expensive again. Problem solved! Backwards ho!"
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Internet has legitimate reason for rate to grow. Calls to telephone numbers don't. People's available time to talk does not scale up.
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There is no legitimate reason for rate to grow. At the carrier level bandwidth is almost free.
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There are two legitimate reasons for taxation: funding public services and disincentivizing harmful economic activity. The latter especially applies here.
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The call recipient's attention does not scale and is a precious limited resource. Using taxes to defend it is a very good idea.
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I'd love to even have the option to force caller to pay $0.20 in taxes every time they call me.
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