As if the direct-to-consumer marketing industry didn’t have enough to worry about, the Czar has received a couple of reports of wholesale SHUT DOWNS of call centers in the last few days allegedly linked back to a quiet decision by the FCC to mandate that tier 1 carriers only accept traffic that averages 30 seconds in duration.

This would be NUTS, and I do not know if it is true. Massive first amendment and Communications Act problem if so. But I do not want to jump ahead of this because my usual sources of truth haven’t said anything about this.

But what I am hearing is pretty scary:

…the FCC now enforcing its outbound dialing 30 second average call duration rule, but this is likely going to upend the entire industry if someone does not fight back. 

Over the last few days, the FCC has started enforcing its 30 second rule with tier 1 VOIP carriers, including twilio, which is the tier 1 carrier that most outbound dialers use. This is a completely unfair and impractical rule. The FCC is now saying only dialers/companies that have an average call duration of 30 seconds plus are allowed on tier 1 cell carriers. This is actually 100 percent impossible. Not a single company that outbounds compliant leads is going to be able to comply with this. Even with the highest quality of leads, the max contact rate in a given day that you will get is about 20%, that means the rest are answering machines. This means that 80% of the calls are 1-6 seconds in length. Therefore, it is completely impossible for anyone’s outbound average call duration to be more than 30 seconds.

This is really fascinating stuff.