Phonebook Legislation

Walking down the street one day to members of the Necesarium were having a conversation when one noticed that the yearly Yellow Pages were being left on people's doorsteps. In addition we noticed that people who received them were putting them in the recycling bin. "What drives this behavior and why do people needa new 5lb phone book every year?"

This led us to being a research project. We found that :

San Franciscans received an unwanted 700,000 phone books from AT&T every year (strange since one book could easily be used for 10 years)

We talked to some climate scientists who confirmed that approximate net emissions from the production and distribution of this activity were X

We talked to San Francisco recology who reported that so many giant phone books ended up on the trash each year that they gummed up the machines that sort trash and were expensive to sort out. Then they were shipped to China for recycling.

In other words, the public and environment were paying huge hidden costs to absorb the burden of AT&T behavior. What was the incentive? Well, it all made sense when we learned that AT&T made $40 MM a year off the advertisement revenue from placing ads in these phone books and claiming that those ads would be put in the hands of 700,000 San Francisco residents. 

We wrote up our findings, prepared them in a legislative brief, drafted a change to city code, found an elected official who was aghast at the behavior -  who agreed to carry this piece of legislation and work with us.

This was a David & Goliath story, inasmuch as a few people were taking on a multi billion dollar corporation (ATT) that was afraid other cities would follow our example. They put all their resources into fighting us - but we won and the legisilation banning unsolicited phone books was passed.

ATT claimed that the legislation would hurt the local economy, but the San Francisco economist found that getting rid of unwanted telephone books would actually benefit the economy and create jobs.

ATT even bused in 300 people from out of town to testify why Yellow Pages phone books are so important.

Our solution was to enable those people who wanted telephone books to get them by making them available in supermarkets or key locations where people could pick them up each year, instead of finding them on their doorstep. ATT would have to take back the unwanted phone books which we estimated were 80%

CODA

Some of the lessons we learned from this bill included needing to have a stronger agreement with the elected, who promised they would involve us at every step of the way... and in particular if they wanted to make changes to the legislation. After the Mayor signed the legislation, ATT sued the city of San Francisco (this was always known as a thing that was coming). In fact we had lined up lawyers who said we would win in court and who would defend the city along with city lawyers. But the legislator got cold feet and called us one day to say he had just made large weakening compromises to the bill with ATT in exchange for them withdrawing the lawsuit. In the end, the issue raised do much awareness of the problem that distribution of Yellow Pages went down preciptitously and the books decreased dramatically in size.