4th Circuit Decision Raises Questions About 2016 Robocall Order
The FCC is starting to look at a decision by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which raises questions about a 2016 order implementing a provision in the 2015 budget law, said Mark Stone, deputy chief of the Consumer…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
and Governmental Affairs Bureau, at an FCBA event Wednesday evening. The order allows robocalls to cellphones for purposes of government debt collection (see 1608110038). The court severed the debt-collection exemption “from the balance of the automated call ban” and remanded the issue to a lower court for “further proceedings as may be appropriate.” The debt-collection exemption “fails strict scrutiny review” and is “fatally underinclusive,” the court ruled Wednesday in American Association of Political Consultants v. FCC. “By authorizing many of the intrusive calls that the automated call ban was enacted to prohibit, the debt-collection exemption subverts the privacy protections underlying the ban,” the court said. “The impact of the exemption deviates from the purpose of the automated call ban and, as such, it is an outlier among the other statutory exemptions.” Judge Robert King wrote the order, supported by Judges Barbara Keenan and Marvin Quattlebaum.