Cell dialers that don’t use a random number generator to store numbers legalized
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Apparently that’s what congress intended when it passed legislation to ban autodialers.
Does the Supreme Court do April Fool’s Day pranks? Are they precedent setting?
Not only is it what they intended, it is what they explicitly wrote into law as the definition of an automatic telephone dialing system. It is a bizarrely narrow, counterintuitive definition, but it is the one explicitly spelled-out in the law.
The Supreme Court seems to have applied the law correctly, its just that the law was written very carefully to be stupid.
To my mind this is an example of the outcome being dictated by the consequences: by the time it reached SCOTUS it had become much more clear how disruptive a contrary ruling would be. The defendant Facebook's argument was just as reasonable, so of course it made sense to choose it. If this case had come 20+ years ago, the plaintiff very well may have won.
SCOTUS Blog's oral argument analysis provides a good summary showing the reasonableness of the plaintiff's argument: https://www.scotusblog.com/2020/12/argument-analysis-justice... At the time it seemed like the justices were quite open to it.
I think it's a funny case because one could easily imagine Gorsuch or Thomas pontificating in a lengthy dissent about how a Real(TM) textual interpretation demands ruling for the plaintiff. I mean, this case is basically a textualist coin toss, but a dissent will always go to the mat. Fortunately or unfortunately, we don't get to enjoy that this time.
You are correct, of course.
I don't think however this is as crazy as it seems at a glance. The author(s) of the law appeared to be trying to prohibit devices that try to call many telephone customers as opposed to contacting a specific number. Calling/texting everyone in town to sell overpriced pre-paid auto repair, illegal. Calling/texting John Doe about his upcoming scheduled visit to his MD, legal. In the later case, the phone number is stored (in a database record of John's contact information) and the system "dials" that number to send him a reminder text message. Paragraph (b) in the syllabus gives two reasons why--dialing emergency numbers and tying up all lines assigned to some entity.
Remember, from Facebook's point-of-view what happened here was something like that second case. They had an existing customer account with a given contact number and used that number to communicate about that account. Deguid did not in fact have a Facebook account. Perhaps as Facebook suggests a previous user of that number did.
This is not an unknown problem. I have a phone number that gets messages about a specific apartment complex frequently. Or did, I muted that sender so if they stopped sending half a year ago I would not know. I suspect some previous user of the number lived those apartments. If Facebook had lost their case those messages would stop. But so would my reminder about office visits to my doctor and I think I would be worse off overall.