Is telemarketing dying?

We are in a war for our privacy. We pay hefty enough fees for our communications. We should be free of being inundated by telemarketers. (Yahoo! charges an annual fee to keep advertisements off your screen with them. With others I don't know.) -- It was Congress that voted the law changes into effect in about 2006. Vote out the scalawags who voted for them, and vote in people who will respect the people they represent.

Its still thriving with overseas companies because our laws cannot be enforced against them. Not to mention we have too many people that fall for their cons. One of my closest friends as a grandfather that fell for one of these medical alert system scam and this dates back to the late 80's to early 90's.

While I am uncomfortable with some of the extra-territorial assertion of our legal system (a practice which I feel had its coming out party when we went after Manuel Noriega on drug charges), we can, under present theory, assert our laws in these situations. However, it is more a matter of cost/benefit ratio, and in the larger scheme of things, such operations are simply flies wandering over here from a distant dung heap.

I am also not sure that I would describe the telemarketing industry as thriving, as many of the sales calls we see on this site are for fringe activities.

I went looking for statistics to see what the facts were, but have had difficulty finding anything useful. This is because (1) inbound call centers (order desks, help lines, etc.) tend to be lumped in with outbound call centers, and (2) most of the figures came from someone with an ax to grind. (I found one promising source, but they wanted $200 to let me read it!)

I did find this with respect to Canadian telemarketing:

"Rising regulation, increased wage costs and falling demand have all hurt industry profit margins during the past five years, but improvements in communications technology and an increased focus on efficiency will marginally increase industry profit in the future."

Source: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/4/prweb10604094.htm

Looking around at various bits and pieces, I get the sense that the industry's condition is fair. It is also perhaps larger than I thought, maybe $18 billion, but with an annual growth of -0.6% . However, this is based on only one source, and I have no idea to its accuracy. Again, this would include everything, from the call centers that support Amazon, to the jerks calling for poorly managed charities.

I suppose the overall industry is doing reasonably well, but I really have my personal doubts about outbound cold calling operators. I don't see many legitimate businesses doing that these days, leaving that segment to the politicians, charities, con artists and crooks.
(There may be some overlap in my categories ;)

Perhaps someone else has access to better numbers, mine are certainly subject to correction.

I would think legitimate businesses have moved to the net. It would be nice if this was a fad that will eventually die out like the 976 numbers.