TCPA Monitor

By: Michele Shuster and Josh Stevens In an amicus curiae brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in connection with the Court’s consideration of Facebook v. Duguid, et al., the U.S. Government requested the Court narrowly interpret the Telephone Consumer Protection Act’s definition of an automatic telephone dialing system (ATDS). Before the Court is the current circuit split between the [...]

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released its Tentative September 30th Open Meeting Agenda.  Notably, the agenda includes a draft STIR/SHAKEN Order. It continues the FCC’s implementation of the TRACED Act and promotes the deployment of caller ID authentication technology. The FCC provided the following summary of what the draft Order would do if passed by the FCC: Require voice service [...]

Political campaigns are in full swing. Soon candidates and political parties will be calling and texting to solicit money, votes, opinions, or all three. Political campaigns are not exempt from the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) or similar state telemarketing regulations. The U.S. Supreme Court recently affirmed this position in Barr v. American Political Consultants, holding that the application of [...]

Last week, in Allan v. Pa. Higher Educ. Assistance Agency, the Sixth Circuit became the latest court of appeals to consider what functionality a system must possess to be an automatic telephone dialing system (ATDS). The court joined the Second Circuit (Duran) and Ninth Circuit (Marks) by holding that a system is an ATDS if it can store and automatically [...]

On July 27, 2020, the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau designated USTelecom’s Industry Traceback Group (ITG) as the official consortium to coordinate efforts to trace back the source of illegal robocalls. ITG is a collection of voice service providers that focuses on tracing the source of suspected unlawful robocalls. If ITG detects likely illegal call traffic, it may work with participants in [...]

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments in Duguid v. Facebook, a case that will hopefully settle at last how an automatic telephone dialing system (ATDS) is defined under the TCPA. The decision comes within days of a Court decision that upheld the TCPA’s sweeping ban on autodialed calls to cellphones while holding that calls made to collect [...]

In 2015, Congress exempted calls made to collect debts owed to or guaranteed by the United States from the TCPA’s autodialer restrictions. Today, in Barr v. American Association of Political Consultants, the Supreme Court of the United States held that the exemption unconstitutionally favors debt collection speech over political and other speech. After determining that the exemption is unconstitutional, the court [...]

The Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) has issued a Declaratory Ruling reaffirming that click-to-text systems requiring human intervention for each individual text message are not automatic telephone dialing systems (“ATDS”). The petitioner, P2P Alliance, argued that its peer-to-peer (“P2P”) texting platform requires a human to “to actively and affirmatively manually dial each recipient’s number and transmit each message one at a [...]

The state attorneys general (“AGs”) have signaled that they are ramping up their efforts to combat illegal telephone calls. Fifty-two AGs, including American Samoa and Puerto Rico, recently issued a letter (“Letter”) to the Industry Traceback Group (“ITG”), stating that the AGs want to strengthen their relationship with ITG to more aggressively combat robocalls. The ITG is a collaborative effort [...]