On July 14, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit affirmed the dismissal of a consolidated class action alleging violations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), holding that the statute’s private-right-of-action provision for unwanted telephone calls does not extend to text messages. The plaintiffs alleged they continued to receive marketing text messages and calls from a medical services company even after asking to stop; they sued under a TCPA provision that provides a private right of action for a person who has received more than one “telephone call” within a 12-month period in violation of the statute’s regulations.

The court found that the ordinary public meaning of “telephone call” at the time of the TCPA’s enactment in 1991 referred to communication via sound, and that text messages, which do not reproduce sound, do not qualify as a new application of that term. The court further noted that other provisions of the statute consistently use the broader term “telephone solicitation,” defined to include both calls and messages, and concluded that Congress’s use of the narrower term “telephone call” in the private-right-of-action provision was intentional, providing a narrower remedy than one covering all telephone solicitations.

The court rejected the plaintiffs’ reliance on prior precedent addressing a different TCPA provision — including a 9th Circuit decision from January holding that text messages qualify as “calls” under that provision (previously covered by InfoBytes here) — and noted that one Supreme Court decision had expressly left the “call” question unresolved. The court also declined to defer to the FCC’s interpretation extending certain protections to text messages, noting the interpretation arose under a different subsection and, in any event, was not binding on de novo statutory review, consistent with the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling that district courts are not bound by FCC interpretations in TCPA enforcement proceedings (previously covered here).

The court further rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that Congress’s amendments to other parts of the statute to address text messages, without similarly amending the provision at issue, reflected legislative approval of the broader interpretation, noting that congressional inaction lacks persuasive significance in most circumstances. The court concluded that policy arguments and the statute’s remedial purpose could not overcome the plain statutory text, stating that “repeated, unwanted text messages are undoubtedly a nuisance” but “do not fall within the private right of action” at issue, and it affirmed the district court’s dismissal of the claims after the lower court also declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over the plaintiffs’ remaining state-law claim.