Since 11 August it has been illegal to ring a consumer in France to sell them something unless they agreed in advance to be called.
The law, backed by President Emmanuel Macron’s government, replaces an opt-out regime with one based on prior consent. The finance ministry put it in one line: “We are thus moving from an opt-out system to one based on prior consent.”
For anyone running outbound marketing this is not a tightening of the rules. It is the removal of a channel, and the reasoning behind it applies to Britain almost word for word.
What Is Actually Banned
The ban covers marketing calls to consumers who have not agreed to receive them. Two exemptions survive.
A company may call where the consumer has already agreed, during a purchase, a shop visit or by completing a form. It may also call about a contract the consumer has already signed. Alice Vilcot, chief of staff at the Directorate-General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control, added the qualifier that matters operationally: consent “can be withdrawn at any time”.
That last point is what makes a consented list a liability rather than an asset. A permission that can be revoked without notice cannot be treated as a stable base for a forecast, and it has to be re-verified rather than assumed.
The penalties remove any temptation to test the boundary. Fines run to €75,000 per call for an individual and €375,000 per call for a company. Priced per call rather than per campaign, a modest dialling operation could generate an existential liability in an afternoon.
Fifteen Years of Measures That Did Not Work
The interesting part is not the ban. It is the list of things France tried first.
Over roughly fifteen years the country banned canvassing from mobile numbers beginning 06 or 07, restricted the hours and days when calls could be made, banned calling altogether in specific sectors including personal training accounts, home adaptations and energy-efficiency renovation, and ran an opt-out platform for consumers who did not want to be contacted.
All of it was still in place, and government estimates say around three-quarters of people in France receive at least one unsolicited sales call every week. In 2024 eleven consumer organisations issued a joint call for a ban, denouncing the “relentless harassment of consumers through countless unwanted marketing calls to landlines and mobile phones”.
That sequence is the case for prior consent, and it is empirical rather than ideological. Each partial measure moved the activity rather than reducing it: restrict the number range and callers change range, restrict the hours and they call within them, ban a sector and they sell something else.
Britain Runs the System France Just Abandoned
The UK model is the one France has concluded does not work.
Under the Telephone Preference Service a consumer registers to say they do not want marketing calls, and companies face fines of up to £500,000 per call for contacting a registered number. The default is that calling is permitted; the consumer has to act to stop it.
The headline penalty is larger than France’s. The structural difference is that it only bites for calls to people who took a specific step, which means the burden of protection sits with the individual rather than the caller.
Germany has had consent-based rules since 2009, and the Netherlands strengthened its canvassing rules in July. The US and Canada run do-not-call registries on the opt-out pattern. Britain is now in the smaller group, and it is the group France just left.
Nobody has announced a UK change, and none of this predicts one. But the direction of travel among comparable European regulators is visible, and a marketing plan that assumes outbound calling remains available for the life of a three-year strategy is making an assumption that has stopped being safe.
Fifty Thousand Jobs, Mostly in Morocco
The cost of the ban lands hardest a long way from France.
Younes Sekkouri, Morocco’s employment minister, told parliament that up to 50,000 jobs are at risk in the country’s call centres. Youssef Chraïbi, president of the Moroccan Outsourcing Services Federation, told Le Matin that the French market historically accounted for more than 80% of the sector’s revenue. The industry has drawn around $100m of investment and generates more than $1bn a year.
This is what an offshored channel looks like when the regulation catches up with it. The economics that moved those calls to Casablanca were the same economics that made the volume possible, and a rule change in one country removes the demand for an entire labour market in another.
The French lawmaker Delphine Batho has said calls from outside the country “will be illegal” and that steps must be taken to block them technically, which closes the obvious workaround before anyone tries it.
The Channel Was Already Shrinking
One detail complicates the disaster framing, and it comes from the industry itself.
Chraïbi noted that “pure telemarketing now accounts for only 15% to 20% of total activity”. The Moroccan sector has already diversified into customer service, technical support and back-office work, which are unaffected by a ban on unsolicited sales calls.
That matters for reading the 50,000 figure. It is a statement of exposure rather than a forecast of redundancies, and the businesses that moved earliest away from outbound selling have already limited their exposure.
The same is true of the marketing channel itself. Outbound calling has been in structural decline for years as response rates fell and answer rates collapsed, which is precisely why the volume had to be offshored to remain viable. France has legislated against an activity that was already becoming uneconomic.
Where the Spend Goes Instead
Money removed from one channel does not leave the marketing budget.
UK budgets have been rising, with marketing budgets revised up again even as financial confidence went backwards, and the concentration is already extreme: search alone took £4.6bn of UK ad spend in a single quarter. A channel closing pushes spend towards the platforms that are already dominant.
There is a warning inside the French experience for those channels too. The consumer association Que Choisir’s president, Marie-Amandine Stévenin, predicted that “many fraudsters will try to change the playing field and operate via door-to-door canvassing” and called for that to be regulated as well. Pressure applied to one channel reappears in the next least-regulated one.
What a Marketer Should Take From This
Three practical conclusions follow, and none of them requires a view on whether the ban is right.
First, treat consent as an asset with a maintenance cost. In a prior-consent regime the permission itself is the licence to operate, it can be withdrawn at any moment, and it needs a record showing when and how it was given.
Second, distinguish an existing-customer conversation from a cold approach in your own systems, because that is the line the law now draws. A firm that cannot tell the two apart in its CRM cannot demonstrate compliance even when it is compliant.
Third, do not assume the current UK position is permanent. The measured lesson from France is that partial restrictions failed for fifteen years and were then replaced in a single step, which is a warning about how quickly a channel can close once a regulator concludes the incremental approach has run out.
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