The Independent View: FCC Asks Telephone Companies to Block Robocalls

For many Americans, the idea of technology that can block automated telephone calls sounds like a solution to all those annoying “robocalls” and interrupted family dinners. But to the nation’s pollsters and campaign professionals, many of whom are gearing up for the 2016 election cycle, a federal government proposal circulated Wednesday to encourage phone companies to embrace the technology feels like an existential threat.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says it receives more complaints about unwanted phone calls than any other issue. As a response, the FCC is asking phone companies to offer services to their customers that block calls placed by an automatic dialer. Pollsters are asking to be exempted from the new guidelines, arguing that legitimate researchers shouldn’t be grouped with telemarketers and debt-collectors. But, for now, the FCC has no plans to establish a carve-out for telephone surveys.

In a blog post on the FCC’s website on Wednesday, chairman Tom Wheeler said that the commission was “giving the green light for robocall-blocking technology.” “The FCC wants to make it clear: Telephone companies can — and in fact should — offer consumers robocall-blocking tools,” Wheeler wrote.

The commission plans on considering the rules at a June 18 meeting in Washington.

But survey researchers say those tools would spell their doom: They would undercut a key element of the science behind modern telephone polling and make the work they can do cost-prohibitive. The proposed rules are “potentially devastating to the survey, opinion and marketing research profession,” said Howard Fienberg, director of governmental affairs at the Marketing Research Association. “The FCC and the chairman are playing fast and loose with their terms, using unwanted calls, telemarketing calls, and robocalls interchangeably, and conflating illegal telemarketing scams with legitimate calls.”

The FCC, which says the new rules would be a win for consumers and were informed by extensive public comments, declined to address pollsters’ claims that they are being unfairly lumped with telemarketers when it comes to blocking automated calls. But a fact sheet accompanying the proposal said there would only be “very limited and specific exceptions for urgent circumstances,” such as alerting bank customers to possible fraud or reminding patients about important prescription refills.

Fienberg says he plans to meet with commission staff over the next two weeks to convince them that legitimate survey research should be exempt, too.

A robocall ban already exists for cell phones; the FCC requires pollsters to manually dial cell phone numbers, which makes including cell phones, an increasing necessity as Americans abandon their landline phones, much more expensive.

The FCC’s proposed rules would affect telephone polls of all kinds. Americans could block all automated surveys, which were already prohibited from calling cell phones, conducted by a recorded voice.

Polls conducted by live interviewers also use automated dialers, and the FCC’s Wheeler made clear those would also be affected, writing that the proposal would “clarify the definition of ‘autodialers’ to include any technology with the potential to dial random or sequential numbers.”

That random-dialing technology, pollsters say, is an underpinning of the science behind survey research. Using a random-digit dialer means that every phone number has an equal chance of being selected for the survey. Random-digit dialing is used by most of the public political pollsters. And while they will still be able to use randomizers to generate numbers to call, operators will then have to dial manually those who’ve elected to block automated calls, as they do for cell phones. Even private campaign pollsters who rely on lists of registered voters would be affected. The landline numbers matched to the voter files they use have traditionally been called using an auto-dialer.

The industry has been fighting the restrictions on calling cell phones for years; it costs roughly twice as much per cell-phone respondent because of the added time of dialing their number manually and the fact cell-phone users are less likely to pick up the phone and agree to an interview than those reached on landlines. “The existing TCPA restrictions on using an autodialer to call a cell phone have long since become archaic, as 58.8 percent of American households are only reachable on a cell phone,” Fienberg said, referring to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

All pollsters can expect their costs to rise significantly if the proposal is adopted. For nonprofit organizations and universities that rely on professional call centers, that means they’ll likely conduct fewer surveys. Colleges that use student operators will require more participants to maintain their current polling levels.

The news media, already stretched thin by shrinking budgets, will likely cut back on polling as well. We will see fewer high-quality surveys to gauge both the state of the horse-race and the factors and issues informing voters’ decisions.

Political candidates will be forced to spend more of their campaign cash for the same volume of polling, which won’t be a particularly big issue for well-funded presidential hopefuls, but could hurt downballot candidates who rely on smaller budgets. “If you’re talking about a $50 million or $100-million campaign,” Republican pollster Jon McHenry said, “you can justify those costs by making your TV and your direct mail campaign as targeted as they can be.”

And it’s not just polling: Campaigns and other groups use automated calls to reach large numbers of voters to deliver political messages. “Campaigns have always used robo-calls to quickly communicate with voters — especially late in campaigns,” said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster who worked for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race.

If the new regulations are approved, they would take effect immediately. That doesn’t mean phone companies would be able to deploy the technology next month, but it’s likely pollsters will be forced to adapt before the bulk of their 2016 election polling.

The first two big tests for pollsters will come over the next four months, when Fox News and CNN will use poll averages to determine which Republican presidential candidates will appear on stages in the first two debates in August and September, respectively.

Some pollsters see a silver lining, however: If landline respondents have to be hand-dialed just like cell phones, there’s no reason for pollsters and groups who sponsor polls to skimp on cell-phone calls to save money. “In round numbers, it equalizes the costs between cell phones and landlines,” said McHenry.

But ultimately, the new regulations, if adopted, could be another significant blow for the telephone polling industry, which has been reeling from Americans’ move away from landlines and increasing embrace of mobile phones. The FCC proposal would further encode rules treating pollsters just like telemarketers when it comes to working over the phone. “The new regulations would just make a bad situation much worse, threatening the integrity and results of research and the companies, organizations and governments that rely upon it,” Fienberg said.

The difficulties with phone polling have led many firms to start conducting surveys over the Internet. But roughly one-in-10 adults live in households without web access, primarily older and lower-income Americans. And some survey researchers balk at using a self-selecting, non-random sample to represent the opinions of the entire population.

Pollsters, meanwhile, are caught in the middle: Phone polling is getting significantly harder, and Internet polling is, for many, not yet a viable replacement.

A few pollsters predicted that if the new regulations are wide-ranging enough to complicate existing campaign practices like robocalls and polling, politicians will find a way to scuttle them before they are adopted.

“Also, wouldn’t it kill ‘tele-town halls?’” Newhouse, the GOP pollster, asked in an email, referring to the increasingly utilized form of constituent engagement. “If members of Congress believed those were at risk, they’d probably revolt!”