Going to get worse SCOTUS just ruled saying a very strict reading definition on robocall to be only random or sequential numbers. So if you already have a list say bought from a 3rd party company of all the phones in the US sounds like you can bulk send now no repercussions.
In my field - politics - campaigns use tools like Hustle which are basically mechanical turk clickers to get around these rules. I'm thinking personally this will change...
I haven’t seen a clear analysis of the decision’s impact. I’ve read it, it’s quite brief. As I understand it, this decision essentially guts the blanket prohibition on spam text messages to cell phones. The rest of the law refers to restrictions on calls to “residential” phone lines, which does not include cell phones, so it’s not clear that there are any other limitations on texts to cell phones - do you see it differently?
This brings up the side issue that the act doesn’t ever mention text messages at all ... everyone has interpreted them to be covered as if they were phone calls, but that’s never been tested at the Supreme Court level.
The decision was unanimous and is really the only possible conclusion from a plain reading of the law. The court didn’t “gut” anything, it’s just a bad law. It’s up to Congress to enact a law that says what they actually want the law to do.
That's because Congress has abdicated its role and we live in a appartjik state where the executive appoints the judicial body and the judicial body legislates from the bench while the admin creates executive actions or has agencies create rules that have the weight of laws.
The system will continue to not work when Congress does not do it's job.
It gutted it, in the sense that we've been operating under an interpretation of the law for the past 20 years and this ruling changes that interpretation dramatically. The law wasn't so much badly written, as technology has completely changed in the time since then.
As an example, if this law were written today, I'm not sure that cell phones would get special status. They were put in the same category as medical emergency lines, because "radiotelephones" were very rare and expensive to operate, whereas today every 12 year old has one.
No, the law was badly written, at least if the goal is to limit all robocalling and not just robocalling using sequential or randomized numbers.
The law essentially says "it is illegal to call someone using an autodialer, where an autodialer is a device that makes calls to phone numbers using a sequential or randomized algorithm." It's pretty clear then that automatically dialing from a prepared list of actual phone numbers is not against this law. If they wanted it to cover the latter case, they could have easily included that in the law, even 20+ years ago.
In my field - politics - campaigns use tools like Hustle which are basically mechanical turk clickers to get around these rules. I'm thinking personally this will change...