WHITE PAPER
Back to the Statute:
D.C. Circuit Levels the TCPA Playing Field
In a much-anticipated decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
Circuit has set aside the Federal Communications Commission’s 2015 Declaratory Ruling,
which broadly interpreted the Telephone Consumer Protection Act’s restrictions on calls
to wireless numbers.
The court held that the mere ability to reprogram a piece of equipment to perform as an
“automatic telephone dialing system” (“ATDS”) does not suffice to give the equipment the
requisite “capacity”; that the Commission has never satisfactorily explained exactly what
it thinks ATDSs must be able to do; and that the Commission’s one-call safe harbor arbi-
trarily limited callers’ ability to rely on consent they had previously received.
This Jones Day White Paper explores the probable implications of the court’s decision.
March 2018
