Colorado has, miracle of miracles, adopted a law to let people register to not receive telemarketing calls. Hoody-freakin’-hoo, since I despise the things, make it a point never to buy anything through them, and still they interrupt my time at home (not to mention, if I screen them via caller ID, they still wipe out my WLAN due to my 2.4GHz cordless phone).
The effort to get this law passed (it goes into effect 1 July 2002) was made by the non-profit Bighorn Center. As part of that effort, they set up a site where people could pre-register their names for the exclusion list. The Public Utilities Commission reasonably decided that those names could be automatically transferred to the official list, if the Bighorn Center took some reasonable efforts to validate them.
Not surprisingly, AT&T and WorldCom are both petitioning the PUC to reconsider. They, along with other companies that telemarket, bitterly fought the registry in the first place.
Any bets whether this ends up in court?