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Since the U.S. Federal Trade Commission launched its free, national do-not-call registry on June 27, consumers who want to stop harassing telemarketing calls have registered more than 10 million telephone numbers; 85 percent of the registrations were done online.

Telemarketers who call numbers on the list after October 1 face penalties of up to $11,000 per call, as well as possible consumer lawsuits. Consumers can sign up for the list by logging on to the Web site of the National Do Not Call Registry. People living west of the Mississippi River can also register by calling 1-888-382-1222. That number will be available nationwide on July 7.

Traffic Jam

On June 27 alone, 7 million telephone numbers were logged into the FTC's online system, according to the agency. That caused the registration Web site to slow to a crawl, according to Keynote Systems, which offers e-commerce performance monitoring. Another 4.6 million telephone numbers were registered on June 28, and 2 million were registered Sunday.

"The highest sustained system access we've seen occurred Friday evening between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. EDT, when 158 telephone numbers were entered in the system per second," the FTC says in a statement on its Web site.

According to Keynote, the rate of traffic that was driven to the main site, as well as to various related sites, caused a significant slowdown, if not a failure of the site to keep up during the first day of registration.

Keynote's instant measurements from six cities around the United States--New York, Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco--show that the site was marginally accessible between 1 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. EDT. Keynote also says the response times for those able to access the FTC site from those cities was 25 seconds or more.

Servers Bolstered

Eileen Harrington, an associate director at the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, says the agency added several more servers to handle the heavy traffic.

David Torok, the FTC's Do Not Call project manager, says that the agency experienced a problem regarding consumers' confirmation e-mail messages: Some people failed to receive the messages because they were being filtered out by spam-blocking software. And, he says, if a consumer had not responded to the confirmation e-mail within 72 hours, the telephone number wasn't added to the list.

Torok says the FTC contacted ISPs to ask them to adapt their systems to handle those e-mail messages. He says consumers who haven't received their confirmation e-mail within 72 hours should register by telephone.

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