Recently, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois denied a car dealership’s motion to dismiss a putative class action alleging violations of the TCPA’s do-not-call (DNC) provisions. The plaintiff alleged that the defendant sent her multiple unsolicited telemarketing text messages after she registered her phone number on the national DNC Registry, in violation of 47 U.S.C. § 227(c)(5) and its implementing regulation, 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(c). The dealership argued that the private right of action under § 227(c)(5) does not cover text messages and applies only to residential landlines, not cellular phones. The court rejected both arguments.

Applying the independent judicial review standard from the Supreme Court’s decision in McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates, Inc. v. McKesson Corp., 606 U.S. 146 (2025) rather than the arbitrary and capricious standard advanced by the plaintiff, the court found that § 227(c)(5) must be read in the context of the broader statutory scheme, including § 227(c)(1), which directs the FCC to regulate “telephone solicitations” — a term the TCPA defines to include “the initiation of a telephone call or message.” The court noted that the FCC’s 2024 amendment to 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(e) expressly applies DNC regulations to text messages sent to wireless phones, and invoked statutory stare decisis, observing that prior circuit and Supreme Court precedent treated text messages as “calls” under the TCPA and that Congress declined to exclude text messages when it amended the statute in 2018.

On the cellular phone issue, the court found that cell phone subscribers qualify as “residential telephone subscribers” under § 227(c), agreeing with the FCC’s reasoning that excluding wireless subscribers would be inconsistent with the overall intent of the TCPA. The court cited other district court decisions observing that because most individuals today use cell phones as their primary or only telephone, limiting the TCPA’s protections to landlines would leave a “tremendous number of individuals’ privacy interests” unprotected.