Over the last week I have received five phone calls from Wyndham Resorts asking if I would like to be surveyed. Every time I tell them that I am not going to do their survey, on all but one call I had to repeatedly state that I would not do the survey for more than two minutes before they would go away.
The advantage of phone spam over email spam is that the caller pays, I guess that they have a time limit of three minutes when calling a mobile phone to save on calling costs.
There have been a number of proposals for making people pay for email to discourage spam. Even a cost of a few cents a message would make spam cease being economically viable for a mass audience (a smaller number of targeted spams would be easier to block or delete). But such plans to entirely change the way email works have of course failed totally.
But for phones it could work. I’d like to have a model where anyone who calls me has to pay an extra dollar per minute which gets added on to their phone bill. When people who I want to talk to call me I could reimburse them (or maybe be able to give my phone company a list of numbers not to bill).
This could also seamlessly transition to commercial use. I would be happy to accept calls from people asking for advice about Linux and networking issues for $1 per minute. With all the people who call me about such things for free already it would be good to answer some questions for money.
Well, I believe that Telstra, for one, already provide such a service (it’s called a “1900” number).
That’s easily done: get yourself a 1900 number.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find a link to figure out how easy it is to get one and what the overhead costs are, because Telstra’s website is utterly useless.