It’s official: The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) reassigned number database (RND), which will hopefully minimize claims brought under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), is up and running after several years in the making.
The RND has a long and tortured history. As our readers will recall, the FCC adopted a rule in December 2018 creating a single, centralized database administered by a third party. The general idea is to reduce the number of TCPA claims where a defendant had proper consent from the prior subscriber of the number but does not have such consent from a new subscriber to whom the number was reassigned.
However, multiple petitions were filed seeking reconsideration of certain aspects of the rule, resulting in the timeline being pushed back on more than one occasion.
In spite of the delays, the RND finally took effect on November 1.
The database generally requires providers to report the last date of permanent disconnection for each phone number on the 15th of each month. The RND will be updated by 8 a.m. ET on the 17th of each month.
Businesses and vendors can query the RND with a phone number and a date to receive a “yes” or “no” response, indicating whether the number has been disconnected since that date. In the instances where the database does not have sufficient information, it will provide a response of “no data.”
To access the RND, callers currently have the option of subscribing in various tiers for one, three or six months at a time (for example, $10 for a one-month subscription to the extra-small tier allows for 1,000 queries; a six-month jumbo subscription for $210,600 gets a caller 180 million queries). The FCC indicated that SomosGov, the third-party administrator for the RND, expects to offer an annual subscription in the future.
Importantly, the RND provides a safe harbor from liability under the TCPA for callers who can prove that the database returned a “no” response when queried. Only good faith callers who can demonstrate that they actually used and reasonably relied on the RND in making calls are entitled to the safe harbor.
For more information about the RND, including a demonstration, click here.
To visit the RND, click here: https://www.reassigned.us
Why it matters: The newly launched RND is a boon for businesses and their vendors, providing a solution to the problem of reassigned phone numbers that has resulted in TCPA litigation across the country. To take advantage of the safe harbor provided by the RND, businesses and their vendors should sign up for the database, establish a protocol for checking numbers and scrub reassigned numbers against the RND before calling or texting.