The FCC recently released a massive Notice of Proposed Rulemaking which will undoubtedly change – and perhaps undo — many of the fundamental requirements of telemarketing that were implemented in the early days of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The NPRM also seeks to impose new requirements on caller identification in order to enhance the STIR/SHAKEN framework by requiring verified caller name information and identifying calls originating from outside the United States.
The Notice also proposes to eliminate outdated requirements including:
- Call abandonment rules prohibiting disconnecting unanswered telemarketing calls before 15 seconds/4 rings.
- Company-specific do-not-call rules.
- Rules requiring a non-900 number for artificial/pre-recorded voice calls.
- Rules treating opt-out requests for one type of call as applying to all types from that caller.
- Rules removing limits on financial institutions to calling only numbers provided by consumers for fraud alerts.
Additional key proposals of the NPRM include the following requirements:
- Requiring terminating voice service providers to transmit verified caller name information whenever they transmit an indication that a call received A-level attestation.
- Requiring originating providers to verify caller identity information accuracy.
- Mandating that gateway providers mark calls originating from outside the United States.
- Requiring intermediate providers to pass unaltered caller identification information about foreign-originated calls.
- Obligating terminating providers to transmit indicators when calls originated from outside the US.
- Imposing a requirement that voice service providers using analytics to block calls consider as a factor whether a call originated outside the US as a factor.
The NPRM can be reviewed here.
A listing of the topics on which the Commission seeks comment is here.
Comments will be due 30 days after publication in the Federal Register, with reply comments due 60 days after publication. Publication has not yet occurred so the clock has not started to tick.
ECAC will continue to monitor these developments and participate in the rulemaking process.
Mitchell Roth
