Businesses may dial large volumes of numbers daily for a variety of legitimate purposes. These calls now appear to have become swept up and conflated with illegal robocalls, with a number of undesirable consequences. Certainly policy makers at the FCC, in reacting to understandable concerns about fraudulent and illegal calling, have been introducing more and more opportunities for voice service and app providers to apply non-transparent, subjective standards to block calls, and further muddy the water for business callers. Continue reading “Do B2C Telephone Communications Now Need to Win the Popularity Contest to Not Be Preemptively Blocked?”
Category - "FCC Actions"
Mike Daly and Mark D. Taticchi quoted in Law360 article “TCPA ‘Merely A Pawn’ In High Court Deference Fight.”
On March 25, 2019, PDR Network and Carlton & Harris Chiropractic appeared in front of the Supreme Court to present oral arguments discussing the issue of whether the Hobbs Act requires federal courts to accept without question the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) numerous orders interpreting the TCPA.
Defendant Debunks Plaintiffs’ Reliance On FCC Order That Never Became Effective
A pair of new cases, one from Alabama and the other from Florida, has doubled down on the conclusion that plaintiffs cannot rely on the Report and Order adopted by the FCC on August 11, 2016 (the “August 2016 Order”) in asserting their TCPA claims, especially when the subject of the calls is debt owed to or guaranteed by the United States government.
Continue reading “Defendant Debunks Plaintiffs’ Reliance On FCC Order That Never Became Effective”
Conflicting Opinions Regarding the Validity of the FCC’s Pre-2015 ATDS Rulings
As our regular readers know, one of the central issues in the ACA International case was whether the FCC’s vague and expansive definition of an ATDS would withstand judicial scrutiny. The D.C. Circuit found that it did not. As we explained at the time, ACA International explicitly set aside the portion of the FCC’s July 2015 Order that pertained to the definition of an ATDS, and by doing so also implicitly set aside the FCC’s prior statements on this subject in prior orders. Continue reading “Conflicting Opinions Regarding the Validity of the FCC’s Pre-2015 ATDS Rulings”
Comment Cycle Begins for the FCC’s Proposed Amendment to Truth in Caller ID Rules
Yesterday, the FCC’s adopted Proposed Rulemaking (“NPRM”) to amend its Truth in Caller ID Rules was published in the Federal Register, triggering the commenting period deadlines. We previously compared the adopted NPRM with the draft document here and provided an overview of the proposed key provisions here. Comments on this NPRM are due by Wednesday, April 3, 2019, and reply comments are due by Friday, May 3, 2019. Commenters should follow the filing instructions provided in paragraph 40 of the NPRM. Drinker Biddle’s TCPA team will continue to monitor this docket and related developments as they become available.
FCC First Report on Illegal Robocalls
On February 14, 2019, the FCC’s Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau released its first report on illegal robocalls (“the Robocall Report”) to address the “onslaught of unwanted calls that has led a lot of consumers to stop answering the phone altogether.” This report is compiled based on data points from more than forty comments submitted by voice service providers, trade associations, analytics companies, and consumers. The Robocall Report provided summary analysis on the following issues:
FCC Adopted Proposed Amendment to Truth in Caller ID Rules
Since Chairman Ajit Pai took office, combatting illegal robocalls and malicious spoofing has become the FCC’s top consumer protection priority. In anticipation of yesterday’s Open Commission Meeting, Chairman Pai issued another press release on Wednesday, calling for “a robust caller authentication system to combat illegal caller ID spoofing” and criticizing carriers that lacked commitment to deploy the SHAKEN/STIR framework by the end of 2019. Between Chairman Pai’s 2018 demands that the FCC make real progress in call authentication and yesterday’s Open Meeting to vote on its draft Proposed Rulemaking to amend existing Truth in Caller ID Rules, Chairman Pai solicited details from several large telecommunications carriers about their caller ID authentication plans. These carriers’ submissions are available here.
Continue reading “FCC Adopted Proposed Amendment to Truth in Caller ID Rules”
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act: Calling for a Re-Do
TCPA Blog contributors Laura Phillips, Justin Kay, and Marsha Indych will discuss the Telephone Consumer Protection Act at the Coalition of Higher Education Assistance Organizations (COHEAO) Annual Conference on January 28, 2019, in Washington, D.C.
With the D.C. Circuit’s decisions in ACA International and Bais Yaakov and the FCC’s December 2018 order kicking off the creation a national reassigned phone numbers database, businesses are understandably happy with the recent direction in TCPA litigation and regulations and optimistic that the FCC will soon issue an order addressing other issues presented in the ACA International decision, once the partial government shutdown ends. Nevertheless, litigation continues, and as discussed at our November conference (The TCPA in 2018: There and Back Again), significant challenges remain: the 9th Circuit’s decision in Marks, the potential for the Supreme Court to upend the regulatory landscape via PDR Network, and the political difficulties of amending the TCPA. Laura, Justin, and Marsha will discuss these topics and more.
For more information about the conference, please visit the COHEAO website.
Cybersecurity & Privacy Policy to Watch in 2019
TCPA Blog contributor Michael Daly is quoted in the January 1, 2019, edition of Law360 in an article titled “Cybersecurity & Privacy Policy To Watch In 2019.” The article provides an overview of the current issues and details of federal, state and international interventions to watch. Continue reading “Cybersecurity & Privacy Policy to Watch in 2019”
Courts Continue to Reject FCC’s Pre-2015 ATDS Rulings in Light of ACA International
In Johnson v. Yahoo!, Inc., No. 14-2028 (N.D. Ill.), the plaintiff alleged that Yahoo! violated the TCPA by automatically texting her after pulling her number from a database of stored numbers. The trial court initially denied Yahoo!’s motion for summary judgment because—based on FCC decisions from 2003, 2008 and 2012—it believed that there were genuine issues of material fact regarding whether the dialing equipment qualified as an ATDS. During the pendency of the case, however, the FCC issued its 2015 Declaratory Ruling & Order, which, as our regular readers well know, was appealed to and eventually rejected by the D.C. Circuit. Continue reading “Courts Continue to Reject FCC’s Pre-2015 ATDS Rulings in Light of ACA International“