By: Tracy Garcia, Esq. and Jeffrey Backman, Esq.
Another court weighs in on whether text messages qualify as “calls” under the TCPA’s Do Not Call (“DNC”) provisions. In Wilson v. Medvidi Inc., No. 5:25-cv-03996-BLF (N.D. Cal. Oct. 7, 2025), the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California held that SMS messages are subject to the TCPA’s DNC rules in the wake of McKesson.
The question has remained unsettled since the Supreme Court’s McKesson decision, which freed lower courts from having to defer to the FCC’s interpretations of the TCPA. That shift has produced a growing split of authority nationwide—and even an intra-circuit split within Florida. See Wilson, 2025 WL 2856295; Davis v. CVS Pharmacy, Inc., 2025 WL 2491195 (N.D. Fl. Aug. 26, 2025); Bosley v. A Bradley Hosp. LLC, No. 25-CV-22336, 2025 WL 2686984, at *5 (S.D. Fla. Sept. 19, 2025). Before McKesson, courts routinely relied on FCC rulings that treated text messages as “calls” under the statute. Now, with those interpretations no longer binding, district court judges are writing on a blank slate, and their conclusions vary.
In Wilson, the court held that there was no meaningful distinction between a telemarketing call and a telemarketing text for purposes of 47 U.S.C. § 227(c). The court reasoned that Congress’s intent in 1991 was to protect privacy from unwanted solicitations regardless of communication medium, noting that both calls and texts invade privacy in the same manner. Judge Freeman went further, characterizing Medvidi’s contrary argument as “tortured reasoning,” affirming that the statute’s plain meaning has always been understood to include text messages within the scope of “telephone calls.”
That puts Wilson squarely at odds with a recent opinion out of the Northern District of Florida, Davis v. CVS Pharmacy, Inc., where the court concluded that “no ordinary person would think of a text message as a telephone call.” With these opposing rulings—and others likely to follow—the split in authority is deepening, creating increasing uncertainty for litigants and businesses alike.
