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For the busy among us, here's a quick recap of the top three major FCC-related actions since the New Year.
1. Callers/Texters: Revoke-All Rule Delayed Again
The Biden-era FCC decided that it would be wise to conclude that a single "stop" request (including far vaguer efforts to unsubscribe) from a consumer should force the receiving company to stop calling or texting them about anything—on pain of more TCPA class actions, which would be guaranteed to happen, or, far less likely, FCC enforcement action. Companies who understandably want to provide informational messages to consumers—on subjects as trivial as their bank account being hacked—advised the FCC that there could be some unintended consequences to the rule. Mere hours before the rule was scheduled to go into effect in April 2025, the FCC pushed the deadline for a year. On January 6, 2026, the FCC provisionally revoked its revoke-all rule again. While this may feel like staying in an unhealthy relationship without simply cutting it off for good, the FCC has delayed the enforcement date of its ill-advised revoke-all rule until January 31, 2027. The can isn't going to get any prettier in the meantime, but it's been kicked down the road until then.
2. Carriers: Refresh Your RMD Entries Before February 5, 2026
The FCC's Enforcement Bureau has been very active in the past year scrutinizing carriers' Robocall Mitigation Database submissions—and removing thousands in the process. The FCC's RMD certification rules have evolved considerably over time, and some of the online database fields are not self-explanatory and/or do not even match what the underlying regulation says. So there are various traps for the unwary lurking in that process, but the FCC has announced that February 5, 2026 is the effective date of its new fines: a base forfeiture of $10,000 for each violation for filers that submit false or inaccurate information to the Database, as well as a base forfeiture of $1,000 for failure to update information that has changed in the Database within 10 days, with those forfeiture amounts "assessed on a daily basis up to the statutory maximum for continuing violations." As you hopefully know, the last update was due in February 2024. Things change – your people, your principals, and your KYC and mitigation practices, for example. The FCC forces you to speak, and now it's going to whack you with major fines if what you said in 2024 is no longer accurate. So do yourself a favor and carefully review your RMD entry and related mitigation plan today.
3. Supreme Court to Review the FCC's Enforcement Authority
Speaking of FCC fines, the Supreme Court has agreed to resolve a recent split among appellate courts about the FCC's authority to impose them in the first place. You may recall that the Biden-era FCC issued $200 million in total fines to AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile for violating the FCC's CPNI rules – think telecom's privacy law – rules by "sharing" (selling, really) your location data to marketers without your knowledge or consent. Oops. AT&T won its appeal in the conservative 5th Circuit, which agreed that AT&T had a constitutional right to a jury trial, while Verizon and T-Mo lost their appeals in the 2nd and D.C. Circuits. AT&T, Verizon, and the FCC all asked the Supreme Court to take the cases, which it now has. This will have major implications, albeit more for the major, well-funded side of the carrier market. Smaller subjects of the FCC's enforcement regime are, of course, ordinarily brought to heel via settlements given the disproportionate resources between the FCC and those parties, while the household-name carriers can fund years-long legal battles against the federal government. But this will still be interesting to see if the carriers were entitled to a trial by jury of their 'peers'—if they can find any jurors whose personal data wasn't sold, presumably.
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