At its December 13, 2023 meeting, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted new rules aimed at closing the “lead generator loophole” in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
The Supreme Court’s
Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid decision finally settled the confusion over what equipment constitutes an automatic telephone dialing system (a robodialer) that can violate the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). Consumers have filed a mountain of class actions collectively seeking billions in statutory damages in the past two decades over unwanted robocalls and texts that they received from businesses calling using software rather than manual dialing. It was unclear, however, whether the software or technology actually violated the TCPA.
The act defines automatic telephone dialing systems as equipment that has the capacity “(A) to store or produce telephone numbers to be called, using a random or sequential number generator; and (B) to dial such numbers.” But lower courts split on whether this phrase applied more broadly to equipment that can store and dial numbers, even if it doesn t use a number generator (i.e., a smartphone that can store and then