Well that’s embarrassing. Last week I criticized the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for failing to act against unsolicited faxes and spam. But, as some readers pointed out, failing to deal with unsolicited faxes is not the FTC’s job - that task falls to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). So, apologies to the folks at the FTC for my misdirected disappointment.

The FCC is doing almost as well at failing to deal with the issue of unsolicited faxes as I accused the FTC of doing. I did a search of the FCC daily digest of news releases for "fax" and found an interesting pattern of fax-related stories. The FCC’s attention to fax issues seems to have fallen off a cliff.

According to the FCC’s January 2007 "Annual Report on Unsolicited Facsimile Advertisements,"
the commission received 47,704 fax complaints representing 102,004 alleged violations between July 9, 2005 and July 9, 2006, and issued 125 citations with more to come. I could not find a report for 2006/2007 so I went through the press releases on the FCC site to figure out what the commission has been doing in this area.

After doing a not-all-that-careful scan, I found 123 press releases with the word "fax" in their titles for the calendar year 2007, but the pattern of the releases is a bit strange. January 2007 saw 42 press releases, then the numbers for the other months followed like this: February (18), March (39), April (none), May (one), June (four), July
(five), August (two), September (two), October (two), November (one) and December (five).
This year I could only find three in January and two in February.

What happened last March? Did almost all of the FCC folk that deal with fax issues retire or get moved to new jobs? I’m rather sure that the junk faxes have not stopped flowing, at least not to my fax machine.

Even when the FCC does act, the action does not always seem all that effective. I mentioned unsolicited faxes from "corporate travel department" in last week’s column. I also mentioned that I’ve been receiving these for years. Imagine my surprise when I found that the first entry in the "entity cited" list in the January 2007 report was Adventure Marketing doing business as "Corporate Travel Center." 

Whatever the FCC is doing it is not stopping some folks from blasting their junk to fax machines everywhere. Note that I have a real fax system, not a gateway to e-mail, so this costs me real money – not just time.