Don’t Bother Me Fee

The political process has been unable or unwilling to prevent robo-calls, email spam, and junk mail. Time for the state to define property rights for phone numbers, email addresses, and mailing addresses.

For this discussion lets just talk about phone numbers. Parallel comments for email and junk mail apply.

With clear property rights to your phone number, you could have a service that would charge anyone who uses your phone number to call you a fee. At your discretion, the fee could be refunded. The only impact would be on those making unwanted calls. You would set the fee rate to a level that would either discourage robo-callers, or make you happy to have the fee.