On April 7, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted a limited waiver delaying by an additional year the effective date of certain parts of the new Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) rule. Specifically, the waiver delays the effective date for the requirement that a caller treat a single reasonable revocation as revocation from all future robocalls from that party on unrelated matters, and to accept that single revocation as applying to all its business units and entities, which the agency treats as the same “party.”
The FCC’s announcement indicated that it applies only to the scope of revocation issues. The bad news for businesses sending texts and making calls? Businesses must still prepare to comply with the rest of the robocall/robotext consent requirements by April 11, 2025. The good news is that companies now have an additional year to implement systems that communicate revocations across different business units within the same company.
On February 15, 2024, the FCC adopted a TCPA Consent Order announcing rules to make it easier for consumers to revoke consent from robocalls and robotexts. Those reasonable revocation rules were set to be effective April 11, 2025. Yesterday’s waiver delays the part of the rules as applied to common business units.
The waiver request came from a group of large banks and financial institutions that requested the delay to give larger entities time to make technical and manual adjustments needed to ensure a revocation made to one business unit is communicated and implemented across an entire company.
The FCC agreed:
In this Order, we grant a limited waiver delaying the effective date of section 64.1200(a)(10) of the Commission’s rules to the extent the rule requires callers to treat a request to revoke consent made by a called party in response to one type of message as applicable to all future robocalls and robotexts from that caller on unrelated matters. Specifically, we find that good cause exists to delay the effective date for this requirement until April 11, 2026, to allow affected parties a reasonable opportunity to implement modifications to communications systems in a cost-effective manner to ensure that they can process revocation requests in accordance with this rule.
It bears reiterating for businesses engaged in outbound calling and texting: the waiver delays the effective compliance date only to the extent it applies to the scope of revocation. The remaining rules set forth in the TCPA Consent Order still come into effect on April 11, 2025, including codification of what the FCC considers a “reasonable revocation,” including a standardized list of specific words that, when used, constitute reasonable revocation. Words like “stop,” “quit,” “end,” “revoke,” and “opt out” are now per se reasonable revocation requests to stop receiving future robocalls and robotexts under the new rule.
