Thursday, April 16, 2009

DirecTV, Comcast Settle FTC Charges

Satellite television provider DirecTV and Comcast Corp., one of the nation's largest providers of cable and Internet services, have agreed to pay a total of $3.21 million to settle separate FTC charges that they violated the "do not call" provisions of the Telemarketing Sales Rule, according to an agency press release. Among the charges were that the companies or their telemarketers called consumers who specifically had told the companies not to call them again. In addition, a DirecTV telemarketer and its principals have agreed to pay a $115,000 penalty for making prerecorded sales calls to consumers who had asked not to be called.

"In both of these cases, DirecTV and Comcast violated consumers' privacy by calling people who specifically had asked these companies not to call them again," FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said in a statement. "What makes DirecTV's actions especially troubling is that it is a two-time offender: DirecTV violated not only the FTC's do not call rules, but also a previous federal court order barring it from exactly this type of conduct." Liebowitz said his agency "won't tolerate firms that disregard consumers' specific requests not to be called, and we will be especially tough on companies that ignore their obligations under prior court orders."

A DirecTV spokesman said the cases pertained to a brief 2007 calling campaign to determine whether the firm had correctly recorded customers' do not call status. He said DirecTV believed the pre-recorded messages were permitted at the time because they were not attempting to sell anything -- but the FTC disagreed. "We're happy to have this behind us," he said. A Comcast spokeswoman pointed out the FTC found her firm's compliance with the national registry to be 99.85 percent and chose not to pursue any claim against them in that area. Their settlement was limited to alleged calls made to those identified on Comcast's internal do-not-call list, where its compliance rate was 99.74 percent.