TCPA — Telephone Consumer Protection Act
ما هو TCPA?
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TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act) is the 1991 US federal law — 47 U.S.C. § 227 — restricting automated calls, texts, and faxes: it requires consent for autodialed or prerecorded marketing contacts and limits telemarketing calls to residential numbers to 8:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m. recipient-local time. Violations carry statutory damages of $500–$1,500 per call or text, which makes it the most-litigated US messaging law.
More detail
## What is TCPA? The TCPA is the federal floor every US outbound caller or texter starts from. Its core requirements: prior express consent — written for marketing — before placing autodialed or prerecorded calls or texts to a mobile number, a ban on telemarketing to National Do-Not-Call Registry numbers, and an 8:00–9:00 recipient-local dialing window for telephone solicitations. The statute carries a private right of action, so individual recipients sue directly and plaintiffs' firms run it at class scale.
Several states pile stricter overlays on top of the federal statute — Florida's FTSA and equivalents in Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and West Virginia, collectively called mini-TCPAs — and the operative rule for a national sender is most-restrictive-wins. The state-by-state dialing windows are documented at docs `/compliance/state-calling-windows`, and the `/glossary/mini-tcpa` entry defines the overlay cluster.
## Where it binds in Orbit The one TCPA control the platform owns outright is the federal voice dialing window: an 8 AM–9 PM recipient-local gate on automated US outbound voice, always on, fail-closed, blocked sends returning `422 TCPA_FEDERAL_DIALING_WINDOW_BLOCKED` — documented at `/docs/concepts/tcpa-federal-voice-guard`. Every other TCPA control is tenant-owned: consent capture and revocation records, DNC and internal suppression lists, quiet hours, frequency caps, and campaign scrub toggles on the messaging stack (`/features/messaging`), defaulting fail-open until the tenant configures them.
الأسئلة الشائعة
- What is the TCPA?
- The Telephone Consumer Protection Act is the 1991 US federal statute (47 U.S.C. § 227) that limits automated calling and texting: it requires consent for autodialed or prerecorded marketing contacts, bans telemarketing to Do-Not-Call-registered numbers, restricts telephone solicitations to 8:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m. recipient-local time, and hands recipients a private right of action worth $500–$1,500 per violating call or text.
- Does TCPA cover text messages as well as calls?
- Yes — courts and the FCC read 'calls' in the statute to cover SMS and MMS, so the same consent and quiet-hour rules apply to marketing texts. Orbit's suppression and consent layers apply across voice and messaging destinations rather than scoping to one channel.
- What TCPA controls does Orbit enforce for my campaigns?
- One: the federal 8 AM–9 PM recipient-local US voice dialing window is platform-enforced, fail-closed, and cannot be unset — violations return a 422 you schedule around. Everything else — consent records, suppression lists, quiet hours, frequency caps — is tenant-owned and configurable, defaulting off until you turn it on.
- How do state mini-TCPA laws relate to the federal TCPA?
- They sit on top of it and go further — narrower consent thresholds, tighter dialing windows, weekend bans in some states. A national sender applies whichever applicable regime is strictest per destination, so federal compliance alone does not discharge the state overlays.
See also
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