📡 The Big Story
The Seventh Circuit Just Handed Text Senders a Loaded Gun (and Plaintiffs' Bar Is Already Reloading)
Look, when a federal appeals court says the quiet part out loud, we pay attention. On July 14, the Seventh Circuit ruled in Steidinger v. Blackstone Medical Services that text messages are not "telephone calls" under Section 227(c)(5) of the TCPA. This week, the big law firms finally finished their hot takes, and Cooley's breakdown confirms what we all suspected: we now have a genuine circuit split, and SCOTUS review just got a lot more likely.
Why does this matter? Section 227(c)(5) is the private right of action that has bankrolled a decade of DNC class action shakedowns. If texts don't count as "calls" under that provision, an entire cottage industry of plaintiff attorneys in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin just watched their favorite fishing hole get drained. The court also went out of its way to limit judicial deference to FCC interpretations, which is a much bigger deal than the headline suggests. That's post-Chevron energy applied directly to telecom regulation.
But here's the thing: Holland & Knight's analysis this week is the sobering follow-up. Plaintiffs' bar is already pivoting to state mini-TCPA statutes in Florida, Washington, Maryland, and Oklahoma. FTSA in Florida alone is generating more litigation than federal TCPA at this point. So if you're a compliance officer breathing a sigh of relief, exhale slowly. The federal door narrowed. The state doors are wide open and painted with dollar signs. 🔥
🔥 What's Moving
Apple Intelligence Comes for Your CTAs in iOS 27 👀
9to5Mac's hands-on with the iOS 27 beta shows Apple embedding one-tap contextual suggestions directly into Messages. Someone asks for photos? Apple surfaces the right ones. Someone mentions a task? Reminder created. This sounds cute until you're a brand trying to design an RCS flow and realize Apple's AI is now the layer between your message and the user's action.
Translation for marketers: your CTAs are now competing with Apple's suggestions for the same tap. If your message contains ambiguous intent, Apple Intelligence will helpfully "assist" the user right past your conversion. RCS creative teams should be redesigning around this yesterday.
Zoom Formally Enters the 10DLC Chat 😴
Zoom rolled out a full 10DLC compliance framework covering Phone, Contact Center, and Meetings. Every UCaaS vendor is now shipping this because they have to, not because they want to. The interesting signal isn't Zoom doing it, it's what it means: 10DLC is no longer a "messaging platform" problem. It's plumbing. If you sell any product that touches an SMS API, you're a compliance company now, whether you like it or not.
Reminder: The Carriers Are Not Bluffing 💀
Fresh guidance this week reiterates what we've been screaming about since February 2025: AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon are fully blocking unregistered A2P traffic. Not throttling. Not delaying. Blocking. And yet, roughly a year and a half in, we still get inbound from businesses wondering why their "texts aren't going through." Because they aren't going anywhere, friend. They died at the gateway.
Australia's Inbox Is Officially Losing to the SMS 🔥
Melbourne-based data shows Australian SMBs reallocating budget from email and paid social to SMS. Email open rates are collapsing, Meta's organic reach is a punchline, and texts still open within minutes. Australia tends to be a leading indicator for other mature markets (they were early on RCS adoption too), so if you're doing 2027 planning in the US or UK, take note.
🏆 Winner of the Week: Defense counsel in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, who just got a new pre-trial motion template and a stronger billable-hours narrative.
📉 Loser of the Week: Any brand still assuming "we'll register 10DLC eventually," because eventually was 18 months ago.
📊 By the Numbers
- 3 states, ~26 million people: The population now covered by the Seventh Circuit's text-friendly TCPA reading. That's a lot of consumers whose class action rights just got a haircut.
- 4 to 6 weeks: Zoom's stated minimum timeline for full 10DLC campaign approval. If your Q4 campaign isn't registered by mid-August, you're already late.
- February 2025: When US carriers switched from throttling to hard-blocking unregistered A2P. That's 17+ months ago. There is no grace period left to invoke.
🔮 What We're Watching
Cert petition timeline in Steidinger. If Blackstone's opposing party petitions the Supreme Court (and they should), we're looking at a potential grant by early 2027. Given the current Court's appetite for pruning FCC deference, this could become the TCPA case of the decade. Set a calendar reminder.
iOS 27 public release. Beta features rarely ship intact, but if one-tap Apple Intelligence suggestions land as previewed, expect a scramble across the RCS ecosystem to A/B test messaging copy against Apple's AI interpretations. Whoever cracks that first has a real advantage.
💡 The Hot Take
Here's my bold prediction: within 18 months, the "TCPA" as we've known it since 1991 will effectively be dead as a meaningful federal cause of action for text messaging, and every serious compliance team will be running 50-state matrices instead. The Steidinger ruling isn't an outlier. It's the leading edge of courts finally reading the statute like it was written in 1991 (because it was), and the Supreme Court's post-Chevron posture means FCC creative reinterpretation isn't going to plug the holes anymore.
What replaces it isn't relief. It's chaos. FTSA in Florida, Washington's CEMA, Maryland's MTCPA, Oklahoma's TCPA, and whatever New York and California cook up next. The compliance burden goes up, not down, because now you're playing 50 games instead of one. The winners in this new world aren't the platforms with the biggest legal teams. They're the ones with the best consent capture, the cleanest audit trails, and product design that treats compliance as a UX problem instead of a legal one. The plaintiffs' bar isn't going anywhere. They're just changing zip codes.
Stay registered, stay consented, and stay skeptical of anyone selling you a "TCPA is dead" narrative. See you next week.
