TextTalk Blog

Not April Fools’: Landmark TCPA Ruling by Supreme Court!

Written by Thomas Peters | Apr 1, 2021 10:51:26 PM

It’s good news for those who wish to connect with citizens, voters and constituents via the most important communication channel of our time: text.

Today the Supreme Court cleared up the legal morass that had surrounded the definition of an ATDS, or autodialer, under the TCPA. We at RumbleUp had been following this case closely, and we are very pleased with the outcome: the Court held in a 9–0 ruling that an ATDS must produce and store numbers using a random or sequential number generator. That is good news for us and for our clients: RumbleUp is definitely not an ATDS under this ruling. (We can’t give you legal advice. We encourage you to contact your legal counsel if you have questions about this ruling.)

We have been anticipating this ruling, and working on a plan to take advantage of any changes in the legal status of messaging that would result from it, and we will be working in the coming weeks to put our plan into action to take maximum advantage of this ruling for our clients.

The TCPA Ruling Will Not Affect You

While the ruling is still fresh, and our legal team is analyzing it closely as we speak, we can share two more good outcomes:

  • RumbleUp clients have a near-perfect chance of prevailing if any legal action were to be taken against them for texting with RumbleUp — so our clients can text with even more peace of mind! This ruling will largely suppress predatory TCPA lawsuits.
  • The Supreme Court made clear that the “human intervention” standard imposed by past FCC rulings no longer applies in the context of the definition of an autodialer under the TCPA regulations.

These two initial take-aways certainly present a significant opportunity to RumbleUp and our customers: texting with RumbleUp is safer than ever, and also potentially easier to execute.

The Big Caveat to Today’s TCPA News

The legal questions surrounding the TCPA law have for some time been secondary to the question of how the phone carriers will decide if our clients’ messages get delivered or not. The good news here is successful message delivery has always been RumbleUp’s strong suit.

In the wake of today’s ruling, we may see phone carriers tighten up their spam filters even further as they did for the final month before the 2020 election. RumbleUp clients enjoyed the best delivery rate of any political vendor during that time, and we expect the same to be true in the future.

Next, while it is probable that our clients will be able to send text messages without the intervention of a human operator sending each message, for the immediate future, the best course of action is to continue with our proven method of getting our clients’ messages delivered reliably using our current protocols. We will be implementing new features and options as we see how the carriers react to this new legal environment.

TCPA Ruling Brings New Opportunities

Happily, we are very well equipped to implement these new features, because for the past six months we have been building blast-texting and automation tools which we can now introduce into RumbleUp, while still taking advantage of all the RumbleUp features that set us apart, including:

  • Enhanced Video Texting (the highest quality video in the texting space)
  • Highest deliverability in the marketplace
  • Rapid-Reply mode for 2-way human conversations at scale
  • Transparent and accurate reporting
  • Intuitive and advanced tagging and audience segmentation
  • Fundraising and data integrations

And the best client support team in the business. The list goes on.

Now that the Supreme Court has closed the book on the legal questions that had surrounded text messaging under the TCPA, we remain focused on the phone carriers and their developing plans to regulate traffic over their networks, to further codify our industry-leading delivery rate for our clients’ traffic.

Bottom Line

The best is yet to come! There will be some changes due to the new TCPA rules, but we see huge upsides for our clients. This is just another chapter in our ongoing mission to ensure that text messaging remains an open, reliable and effective channel for our clients.

We will be in touch as we further digest today’s ruling and implement the plan we outlined above.

As always, and especially today — Happy texting!

Sign up and start texting today or get in touch directly: info@rumbleup.com

Additional Resource: https://tcpaworld.com/2021/04/01/facebook-is-out-the-6-most-critical-take-aways-and-one-most-important-question-following-the-supreme-courts-huge-tcpa-atds-ruling-today/