The groups asked the FCC to confirm that telemarketing consent is not required for informational prerecorded calls to landlines.
6/30/2021 12:00
ACA International Vice President and Senior Counsel of Federal Advocacy Leah Dempsey was among representatives of various associations who met with staff from the Federal Communications Commission last week to discuss Telephone Consumer Protection Act issues. The group filed an ex parte, accessible here, on June 24.
At the meeting, the group reiterated its support for the FCC’s goals of protecting consumers from illegal automated calls and ensuring that consumers continue to receive important, time-sensitive, informational calls from legitimate businesses.
They discussed their March 2021 petition to reconsider a limited portion of the TCPA Exemptions Order, which “adopted new and counterproductive restrictions on informational prerecorded calls to residential landlines that have been exempt from the Telephone Consumer Protection Act’s prior express consent requirements for approximately 30 years,” according to the ex parte notice.
The group focused on the petition’s four requests:
- To ensure that consumers can continue to receive the important informational calls that they have requested and consented to receive about their electric service, financial accounts, package deliveries, and healthcare, the commission should promptly correct its codification of 47 C.F.R. 64.1200(a)(3), which as drafted would inadvertently require “prior express written consent” for certain informational prerecorded calls placed to residential landlines. The commission should fix this drafting mistake promptly using the language proposed in the petition.
- The commission should revisit the one-size-fits-all limitation of three calls per 30 days per line for exempted informational prerecorded calls to residential landlines. Instead of a per-line restriction, the commission should adopt limits (e.g., per-account and per-event limits) that better reflect the unique, pro-consumer aspects of financial services, electric services, package delivery and healthcare communications that must be placed to residential landlines.
- The commission should continue to recognize the different safety, physical and financial health and other benefits to consumers of informational calls and reconsider its decision to extend its telemarketing opt-out requirements to certain informational prerecorded calls placed to residential landlines.
- To ensure that customers with a landline phone can continue to receive the same outage notifications, safety warnings and other informational notifications that their neighbors with wireless phones will receive, the commission should confirm that its past guidance regarding “prior express consent,” including for example as it did in the electric power context under the 2016 EEI Declaratory Ruling, applies with equal force to calls placed to residential landlines.
The groups asked the FCC to confirm that telemarketing consent is not required for informational prerecorded calls to landlines. Read the full ex parte notice here.