Is B2B Cold Texting Legal? Every Law and Court Case, 1991–2026

The full 42-minute walkthrough. Every authority referenced is listed and linked at the bottom of this page.

Why nobody can give you a straight answer

Ask ten people whether cold texting a business is legal and you will get answers ranging from “absolutely not, you’ll be sued into the ground” to “businesses can text whoever they want.” Both are wrong, and both are wrong for the same reason: almost nobody has read the statute.

The confusion is structural. The law is 35 years old, it was written about a technology that did not exist yet, and for most of those 35 years the agency interpreting it kept expanding what it covered. Then, over about five years, the Supreme Court took that expansion apart. Most of the advice circulating online describes the world before that happened.

The timing problem nobody mentions

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act became law on 20 December 1991. The first text message in history — the word “Merry Christmas” — was sent on 3 December 1992, a full year later. Text messaging did not reach mainstream American use until the early 2000s.

Congress was not regulating text messages in 1991, because text messages did not exist. What Congress was regulating was machines that dialled homes with recorded voices. Read the statutory findings and it is unambiguous: the concern is automated calls to the residence.

SMS came inside the TCPA in 2003, not through Congress and not through a court, but through one paragraph in a 200-page FCC order — paragraph 165 of FCC 03-153, which declared that the Act “encompasses both voice calls and text calls to wireless numbers.” Every text-message TCPA case for the next two decades traces back to that sentence.

What an autodialer actually is

This is the single most misunderstood definition in the field. 47 U.S.C. 227(a)(1) defines an automatic telephone dialing system as equipment with the capacity to store or produce telephone numbers using a random or sequential number generator, and to dial them.

For fifteen years the FCC read that far more broadly, holding that a predictive dialer working through a stored customer list qualified. Under that reading essentially every SMS platform on earth was an autodialer. The D.C. Circuit set the interpretation aside in 2018 as “an unreasonably expansive interpretation” that would have covered an ordinary smartphone, and the circuits then split badly over what remained.

The Supreme Court resolved it unanimously in Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid, 592 U.S. 395 (2021): to be an autodialer, a device must store or produce a number using a random or sequential number generator. Full stop.

If your numbers come from a list rather than a generator, you do not have an autodialer. Federal TCPA filings fell roughly 31% in the six months that followed.

Plaintiffs then tried every remaining angle, and appeals courts closed each one: shuffling the send order is not generating numbers (Borden, 9th Cir. 2022); having the capability without using it is not enough (Panzarella, 3d Cir. 2022); a staffer casually saying “we use an autodialer” is not evidence of one (Guthrie, 4th Cir. 2023); and a text message is not a prerecorded voice (Soliman, 2d Cir. 2024).

A business number is a business number

The second half of the fight is about who the do-not-call rules protect. The answer in the rule text is specific: 47 C.F.R. 64.1200(c)(2) is written around the residential telephone subscriber. Business numbers appear nowhere in it.

The FCC was asked directly, in 2005, to exempt business numbers outright. It declined — but explained that the registry “applies to residential subscribers and does not preclude calls to businesses,” and that business numbers inadvertently registered are not violations. That paragraph has never been reversed.

Courts have drawn the line by conduct rather than by label. A line stays residential, as one court put it, only “as long as the subscriber does not hold out such numbers to the public as a business line.” Where a plaintiff had put the number on his business card, his letterhead and his court filings, the presumption was rebutted.

The case most often cited against B2B outreach actually supplies the test. Chennette v. Porch.com (9th Cir. 2022) held that mixed-use cell numbers are presumptively residential — but only at the pleading stage, and expressly rebuttably, listing five factors: how the number is held out to the public, whether the carrier lists it as residential or business, extent of business use, who pays the bill, and how a reasonable observer would see it.

A number a business published on its own listing so customers can call satisfies the first factor on its face. And in Payne v. Sieva Networks (N.D. Cal. 2024), where the numbers came from federal USDOT registrations — a database only commercial operators appear in — the court held the burden of showing residential status is the plaintiff’s, and that the source of the list defeated it across the class.

2025: the agency loses its grip

Two Supreme Court decisions changed the ground underneath all of this. Loper Bright (2024) ended the rule requiring courts to defer to a reasonable agency reading of an ambiguous statute. Then McLaughlin Chiropractic v. McKesson (2025) held that district courts are not bound by the FCC’s interpretation of the TCPA at all — they interpret the statute themselves.

The practical consequence is enormous. Every expansion of the TCPA onto text messaging rests on FCC orders. After 2025, a defendant can simply argue the FCC got it wrong — and in 2026, defendants started winning that argument.

2026: texts are not calls

The private right of action for do-not-call violations, 47 U.S.C. 227(c)(5), lets someone sue who “received more than one telephone call.” Elsewhere in the same section Congress wrote “telephone call or message.” It used the narrower phrase where the lawsuits come from.

On 14 July 2026 the Seventh Circuit held in Steidinger v. Blackstone Medical Services that a text message is not a telephone call under that provision — the first federal appeals court to decide it. In 1991 a telephone call meant sound; the first text was sent in 1992. The ruling binds Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin.

District courts in Georgia, Ohio, Florida, Illinois and Indiana have reached the same conclusion. Courts in the Ninth Circuit have gone the other way, and the Ninth Circuit itself held in Howard v. RNC (January 2026) that a text is a call — though under a different subsection. An appeal raising the same question is pending in the Eleventh Circuit.

Two federal appeals courts now disagree about what a text message is, on a statute that generates tens of thousands of cases a year. That is the classic setup for Supreme Court review. And every time the Court has taken up the TCPA in the last five years, it has read the statute narrower than the agency did.

Where I stand, and what we actually do

I run TaskBlink. Roughly 90% of our clients use our data and systems for cold B2B outreach over text. Here is our position, and the evidence under each part of it.

1. We do not use an autodialer. We use targeted, curated lists and personalised messages. Nothing in our stack generates phone numbers.
2. We message numbers businesses published themselves as their business line, so customers can contact them.
3. We do not message consumers. We message entities. The TCPA was never written to stop one business contacting another business about business. There is no home involved — there is a company, a published business number, and an offer that company could plausibly use.
4. We send text messages, not calls — and the do-not-call lawsuit provision reaches telephone calls.
5. And when it was actually tested in court, we won.

Five independent defenses. A claim has to beat all five.

The case I was sued over

In 2026 a web designer with four business numbers registered on the Do Not Call list sued me personally, claiming six violations and asking the court to find nineteen.

The court entered judgment for the defendant. Its finding: targeted listing data “uses specific, purposeful criteria rather than pure chance or simple counting,” the alleged violations “were not violations of the TCPA and did not constitute abusive telemarketing practices,” and the plaintiff had not met his burden of proof. Costs were assessed against him.

Cause No. 41C01-2602-SC-000383, Johnson Circuit & Superior Courts, Indiana. It is a small claims judgment and it binds no other court — I am not going to pretend otherwise. What it is: a motivated opponent testing this exact model in front of a judge, and losing.

Every source, in the order I cover them

All 46 authorities referenced in the video. Search runs a Google search for that authority plus the word “outcome,” which surfaces the holding immediately. Source goes straight to the primary document — the court’s own opinion, the U.S. Code, the eCFR, the FCC’s document server or the state legislature. Free, no paywall, no account.

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