On November 29, 2012, the FCC issued a Declaratory Ruling that sending a one-time confirmatory text message within five minutes of receipt of a consumer’s request that no further text messages be sent does not violate the TCPA or the FCC’s rules as long as the sender had prior express consent to send text messages using an automatic telephone dialing system.
The FCC held 1. The FCC’s definition of an “ATDS” under the TCPA is reiterated, as held in its 2003 TCPA Order – “this definition covers any equipment that has the specified capacity to generate numbers and dial them without human intervention regardless of whether the numbers called are randomly or sequentially generated or come from calling lists”. 2. The TCPA and its legislative history do not address revocation of consent. So, the FCC claimed the authority to fill in the gap holding that an opt-out confirmation text message is part of the opt-out process. 3. That confirmation-text class-action lawsuits threatened business and served only the interests of trial lawyers. http://www.fcc.gov/document/declaratory-ruling-re-soundbite-tcpa-petition