On February 13, 2026, the United States District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana issued a significant ruling in McGonigle v. Shopperschoice.com, L.L.C., holding that the Telephone Consumer Protection Act’s (“TCPA”) private right of action for violations of the Do-Not-Call Registry extends to unsolicited text messages sent to cell phones. This decision comes amid a growing split among district courts addressing the scope of TCPA protections in the post-Loper Bright era.
Background
Plaintiff alleged that after obtaining a new telephone number in August 2024, he registered the number with the Federal Trade Commission’s Do-Not-Call Registry. Despite this registration, plaintiff received eight unsolicited text messages from a company advertising and marketing its services. Plaintiff asserted that he never gave defendant prior express consent to receive these messages and did not request promotional materials from the company.
The Court’s Analysis
Defendant moved to dismiss plaintiff’s claims under 47 U.S.C. § 227(c)(5), arguing that the statute’s reference to “telephone calls” does not encompass text messages and that cell phones do not qualify as “residential telephones” under the TCPA.
The court denied the motion to dismiss in its entirety, addressing two critical questions of statutory interpretation that have divided courts following the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which eliminated Chevron deference to agency interpretations.
Text Messages as “Telephone Calls”
The court adopted the reasoning of Alvarez v. Fiesta Nissan, Inc., a recent decision from the Southern District of Texas, which conducted a thorough originalist analysis of whether text messages are “telephone calls” under Section 227(c)(5). Looking to dictionary definitions from the time of the TCPA’s enactment in 1991, the court found that “call” was defined as “to get or try to get into communication by telephone,” and that “telephone” when used as a verb meant “to communicate by telephone” or “to send by telephone”. These broad definitions, the court reasoned, are capacious enough to embrace later technological developments such as text messaging.
The court further emphasized that Congress’s definition of “telephone solicitation” under the TCPA includes “the initiation of a telephone call or message,” and that Congress later ratified the FCC’s interpretation by enacting the TRACED Act in 2019, which explicitly recognized that text messages are covered under Section 227(b). Although this ratification applied directly to Section 227(b), the court found it “strongly persuasive” as to Section 227(c), which uses identical statutory language.
Cell Phones as “Residential Telephones”
The court also rejected defendant’s argument that cell phones cannot be “residential telephones” under Section 227(c), noting that district courts addressing this issue post-Loper have consistently held that cellular telephone users can qualify as “residential telephone subscribers”. As the court explained, any contrary interpretation would be “contrary to Congress’s purpose in enacting the TCPA,” which was to protect subscribers’ privacy rights regardless of whether solicitations are received on a cell phone or a landline.
The court found that plaintiff adequately alleged his status as a residential subscriber by pleading that he was the sole user of the phone number, used it exclusively for personal and residential purposes such as communicating with friends and family and scheduling appointments, and did not use the number for any business or commercial purposes.
Treble Damages
Finally, the court held that plaintiff sufficiently alleged willful and knowing violations of the TCPA, which could entitle him to treble damages. Plaintiff alleged that defendant knew or should have known that his number was on the Do-Not-Call Registry and that defendant knowingly declined to subscribe to the FCC’s Reassigned Number Database, which is designed to help companies avoid calling reassigned numbers registered with the DNC Registry.
