There should be government maintained DO CALL lists. Membership on the DO CALL list should require a monthly payment of one cent (which may not be paid in advance by more than 30 days) to keep the lists up to date. There should be multiple lists so that you can select what kind of calls you will accept: political, surveys, scams, frauds, merchandise for sale, charitable solicitations, etc. The rest of the cost of administering this should be collected from solicitors when they buy the lists.
Phone lines (this includes cell phones) should be of two types: soliciting and non-soliciting. All of your phone lines must be of the same type. All phone lines at a given location must be of the same type. If you do soliciting from a phone line, it must be a soliciting phone line. (If this sounds like old rules for business lines, it's much the same idea.) Anyone who personally does soliciting may not have non-soliciting phone lines at home or at work or anywhere else. Managers and CEOs of call centers that do soliciting may not have non-soliciting phone lines at home, at work, or anywhere else.
When you make a call on a soliciting phone line to other than 911 or a number on the DO CALL list, $200 (plus applicable taxes) is billed to the calling number, of which $100 is credited to the recipient's phone bill, and $100 to the recipient's phone company for billing services. The recipient phone does not start ringing until the payment clears and is credited to the recipient's account (so, for all practical purposes, the solicitor's account is a prepaid account), however, minutes (if applicable) are charged from when the solicitor finished dialing, if not sooner. The payment is made whether or not the call is answered. The recipient may refund the payment (including the phone company's part) by dialing *86 after the call, but is under no obligation to do so, and the recipient may not relinquish his right to the money by contract. The money must be credited back to the solicitor's phone account within 180 days.
Income tax note: the $100 paid to the phone company and the victim is not taxable income, but the $200 plus taxes paid by the solicitor is non-deductible and is *taxable income* to the solicitor.
If a person gets a solicitation call from a line classified as non-soliciting, that person has standing to personally sue for one million dollars per mis-classified phone line. This is not limited to the *first* person to sue, but any who received calls from a non-soliciting line. The same applies to anyone who can prove a line is mis-classified as non-soliciting (beware: boiler rooms, your employees will rat you out). If the line is still mis-classified
10 milliseconds after the lawsuit, the person may sue again (and invite the world to do the same).