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Ajit Pai Celebrates After Court Strikes Down Obama-Era Robocall Rule (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Federal judges have struck down an anti-robocall rule, saying that the Federal Communications Commission improperly treated every American who owns a smartphone as a potential robocaller. The FCC won't be appealing the court decision, as Chairman Ajit Pai opposed the rule changes when they were implemented by the commission's then-Democratic majority in 2015. Pai issued a statement praising the judges for the decision Friday, calling the now-vacated rule "yet another example of the prior FCC's disregard for the law and regulatory overreach." The FCC's 2015 decision said that a device meets the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) definition of an "autodialer" if it can be modified to make robocalls, even if the smartphone user hasn't actually downloaded an autodialing app. That interpretation treats all smartphones as autodialers because any smartphone has the capability of downloading an autodialing app, judges ruled. Since any call made by an autodialer could violate anti-robocall rules, this led to a troubling conclusion: judges said that an unwanted call from a smartphone could violate anti-robocall rules even if the smartphone user hasn't downloaded an autodialing app.
"The Commission's understanding would appear to subject ordinary calls from any conventional smartphone to the Act's coverage, an unreasonably expansive interpretation of the statute," a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said in a unanimous ruling Friday. The ruling came in a case filed against the FCC by the Association of Credit and Collection Professionals, which says it represents "third-party collection agencies, law firms, asset buying companies, creditors, and vendor affiliates." Judges also invalidated an FCC rule that helped protect consumers from robocalls to reassigned phone numbers.
"The Commission's understanding would appear to subject ordinary calls from any conventional smartphone to the Act's coverage, an unreasonably expansive interpretation of the statute," a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said in a unanimous ruling Friday. The ruling came in a case filed against the FCC by the Association of Credit and Collection Professionals, which says it represents "third-party collection agencies, law firms, asset buying companies, creditors, and vendor affiliates." Judges also invalidated an FCC rule that helped protect consumers from robocalls to reassigned phone numbers.
Lets be honest, any laws against robo-dialers wasn't working or couldn't being enforced anyway. Any call I get from a number that's not in my contacts goes straight to voicemail, which is then translated into a text message. In fact, I rarely get a phone call from someone in my contacts as most personal interaction has moved to text messages.
Pure robocalls really aren't the battlefront these days. The TCPA also applies to automated dialing systems that dial numbers until they find someone who picks up, and then connects the call to a human (the "hello?" . . . CLICK . . . pause . . . "Hello, am I speaking with [name]" routine). Companies that have legitimate reasons to call you want to use systems like this because they're a lot more efficient than having a human dial number after number trying to find people who are home/can pick up. The number of bureaucratic hoops they have to jump through and paper trail they have to retain just to make sure they're not exposing themselves to liability--simply because they're calling you, their established customer, but are using a system more efficient than a human punching digits on a phone--is dizzying.
I have installed an autodialer on my smartphone (and previously on a PC) to repetitively call a number, hang up on busy, and redial until I get connected. The use case is trying to make a reservation for Phantom Ranch in the Grand Canyon and the recipient is a vendor for the National Park Service. Is this wrong and should be illegal?
It's bitztream the autism-hating, custom EpiPen-hating, Musk-hating, Qualcomm-hating, Firefox tabs-hating, Slashdot editors-hating Slashdot troll!
That's what we get for allowing collectives to be treated as 'persons before the law'.
So tell us, how would you fix that problem, without getting rid of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances? I am all for limiting the rights of corps like Apple, Ford, and Coke, but it needs to be done in such a way that the First Amendment rights of the NRA, the EFF, and even PETA are not trampled. Regardless of how many of the second 3 you support (I figure most /.ers will support at least 1), you cannot deny that they are fundamentally different from the first 3 that I mentioned (and are fundamentally similar to each other).