The FCC Issues Final Rule Formally Eliminating The One-to-One Consent Requirement

The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has recently issued a final rule under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which formally eliminates a prior rule which had required that a customer's "prior written consent" to receive telemarketing "robocalls" be limited to receiving those calls from one specific seller. 47 CFR § 64.1200(f). The FCC previously promulgated that "one-to-one consent" restriction in 2023, which sought to prevent sellers from bundling and selling customers' contact information to other sellers, a practice known in the industry as "lead generation." Under the FCC's prior rule, a customer could not give consent to receive robocalls, or other telemarketing, to multiple sellers unless the customer separately and expressly consented to receive such marketing from each seller individually.

The propriety of the FCC's prior rule was then challenged in a petition to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, pursuant to the Hobbs Act, filed by Insurance Marketing Coalition Limited (IMCL), which argued, in part, that the FCC had exceeded its statutory authority by implementing the "one-to-one consent" rule which, in the petitioner's view, conflicted with the plain meaning of the language in the TCPA requiring a customer's "prior written consent" before receiving automated marketing calls. Insurance Marketing Coalition Limited v. Federal Communications Commission, 127 F.4th 303 (11th Cir. 2025). IMCL additionally challenged a related restriction that any consented-to robocalls "must be logically and topically associated with the interaction that prompted the consent."

In reviewing the FCC's order, the Eleventh Circuit agreed with the petitioner and held that although Congress had given the FCC the authority to issue regulations to implement the TCPA, its interpretation of "prior written consent" as meaning "one-to-one consent" was inconsistent with the ordinary statutory meaning of that term. In the Court's view, "prior written consent" merely required that customers have "clear and unmistakable" information that they were to receive robocalls from various possible sellers, not that the robocalls were only permissible if they were placed by a particular seller from whom the customer had expressly consented to receive robocalls or other telemarketing – an interpretation which the Court found to be beyond the FCC's statutory authority to impose.

As for the FCC's "logically and topically related" restriction, the Court similarly concluded that a customer can, under the TCPA, also "provide prior express consent 'clearly and unmistakably'... on a website with no logical or topical relationship to the call being consented to," and that such consent had been proper prior to the promulgation of the FCC's contrary rule in 2023. Accordingly, the Court held that these rules fell outside the commission's authority and vacated the FCC's order which promulgated them. The Court further vacated the FCC's implementation of the rules and remanded the matter to the FCC for further proceedings.

In early 2024, the FCC had temporarily postponed the implementation of its one-to-one consent rule while the above-referenced litigation was pending. Notably, soon after the Eleventh Circuit issued its decision, the FCC decided not to further challenge it. Now, with the implementation of its final rules under the TCPA concerning customer consent, the one-to-one consent rule can now be deemed to be formally abandoned, providing some relief to telemarketers and other "lead generators" under the TCPA.

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