On January 24, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit vacated Part III.D of the FCC’s 2023 Order, known as the “one-to-one consent rule” in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which was scheduled to take effect on January 27, 2025. The FCC’s rule interpreted “prior express consent” as used in the statute to mean that a consumer could only give consent to “one seller at a time” and where consent was obtained. Messages from telemarketers had to be “logically and topically associated” when interacting with the consumer. As previously covered by InfoBytes, the FCC promulgated this rule to curtail existing telemarking and robocall practices.
The court ruled in favor of the petitioner, a coalition of insurance industry members, by finding that the FCC’s interpretation exceeded its statutory authority by redefining “prior express consent” in a way that conflicted with its ordinary meaning. The court rejected the FCC’s logically and topically related requirements along with the one-to-one consent rule, holding that to give prior express consent, “one need only ‘clearly and unmistakably’ state, before receiving the robocall, that he is willing to receive the robocall.”
In response to the ongoing legal proceedings, the FCC postponed the effective date for the revised rule to January 26, 2026, or until the lower court reaches a decision on remand.
