Well ladies and gentlemen, the paradigm continues to evolve every day and now we have more good news to report for you! Another district has just gone green as the updated map shows and further reinforces that the “texts aren’t calls” argument is the majority.
Coming out of the Western District of Virginia, in Lowrey v. Twilio, Inc., No. 6:25-CV-00116, 2026 WL 2958730 (W.D. Va. Oct. 1, 2026), the court held that not only are text messages not “telephone calls” under § 227(c)(5), but also that cell phones do not qualify as “residential lines.”
Not only does this represent another court agreeing with the now infamous (and in my not so humble opinion, powerful and correctly decided case) Steidinger v. Blackstone Med. Servs., 182 F.4th 532, 539 (7th Cir. 2026), but the argument that cell phones are not “residential” as the plain text describes continues to gain even more traction.
Let’s get into it, shall we?
So a guy gets a voicemail from someone named “Emma,” asking if she can help with his late father’s probate case. Allegedly, her voice sounds a little too smooth and perfect. A few weeks later he allegedly gets a call from “Nadine” providing the same pitch and delivery. When the person tries to get them to stop calling, he hears “All three attempts failed. 429: you’ve exceeded your current quota. Please check your plan and billing detail.” Apparently the robocall glitches and read him an OpenAI error message mid-call (and that’s not a joke I made up, that’s literally what’s alleged in the complaint, and it’s why the lawsuit ended up naming Twilio and OpenAI directly, not just the probate company that hired them).
However, buried in that slightly absurd case, though, is the ruling that is actually worth digging into, because the court didn’t just wave its hands, it walked through the statutory text carefully (and methodically), and the reasoning is genuinely useful if you’re on the defense side of one of these kind of case.
The court here addressed the first issue which is does a text message count as a “telephone call” under the TCPA’s do-not-call provision, 47 U.S.C. § 227(c)(5)? That section lets someone sue if they’ve “received more than one telephone call within any 12-month period” from the same entity, after that entity broke the do-not-call rules. Plaintiffs’ firms have pushed hard to read “telephone call” broadly enough to swallow texts too. The court said no, and leaned on something almost embarrassingly simple: how people actually talk. As the Seventh Circuit put it in Steidinger, which this court adopted, “text messages do not reproduce sounds, suggesting that they do not qualify as a new application of telephone call within the meaning of that term.”
The district court case that served as the basis for the Steidinger ruling made the same point even more bluntly in Jones v. Blackstone Medical Services, LLC, 792 F. Supp. 3d 894, 899 (C.D. Ill. 2025), noting that “in today’s parlance, ‘telephone call’ means something entirely different from ‘text message.’” And this is my favorite, Judge Moon in writing the opinion for Lowrey said it even better: “If someone says, ‘I’m going to text you,’ the listener would not expect a telephone call. Likewise, if someone says, ‘I’m going to call you,’ the listener would not expect a text.”
It’s not just vibes, either. The statute itself backs this up. Section 227(a)(4) defines a “telephone solicitation” as the initiation of “a telephone call or message,” language that only makes sense if Congress understood those as two different things, not the same thing wearing two names. And separately, § 227(e)(8) excludes “real-time, two-way voice or video communication” from the definition of a text message, which again only matters if texts and calls were never meant to be treated as one category. This court isn’t out on a limb on this either. It joins a real stack of other rulings reaching the same conclusion, including Stockdale v. Skymount Property Group, 2026 WL 591842 (N.D. Ohio Mar. 3, 2026), Radvansky v. 1-800-Flowers.com, Inc., 2026 WL 456919 (N.D. Ga. Feb. 17, 2026), and James v. Smarter Contact, Inc., 2026 WL 879244 (M.D. Fla. Mar. 31, 2026), among others. This is a trend now, not an outlier.
See the article below that we have recently blogged about where two courts in District of Colorado have held the same thing in as many weeks, adopting Steidinger in its analysis.
RADVANSKY GETS RINSED: Colorado Court Finds That Text Messages Are Not Calls
The second issue is the one that surprises people who aren’t steeped in this law: your cell phone isn’t “residential.” Section 227(c) exists to protect “residential telephone subscribers,” and Congress never actually defined that phrase, so the court had to work it out from scratch, since, as it noted, “the Fourth Circuit has not addressed whether cell phone owners are considered ‘residential telephone subscribers,’” citing Gaker v. Q3M Insurance Solutions, 2023 WL 2472649, at *2 (W.D.N.C. Feb. 8, 2023). The court went back to basic dictionary definitions: a “residence” is “a building used as a home,” and by contrast, “a cellphone is a portable device that can be used anywhere by connecting to a mobile network.” One is tied to a building. The other lives in your pocket. They’re just not the same kind of thing, linguistically, physically or legally.
The structural argument is the stronger one for defense counsel, honestly. The TCPA separately bans robocalls to cell phones under § 227(b)(1)(A)(iii) and to residential lines under § 227(b)(1)(B). If “residential” already meant “cell phone too,” one of those provisions would be pointless, which courts generally try hard to avoid when reading a statute, under the long-standing canon that a statute should be read so that “no clause, sentence, or word shall be superfluous, void, or insignificant.” TRW Inc. v. Andrews, 534 U.S. 19, 31 (2001) (quoting Duncan v. Walker, 533 U.S. 167, 174 (2001)). And this isn’t a novel theory the Virginia court invented on its own. The Supreme Court already confirmed in Barr v. American Association of Political Consultants, Inc., 591 U.S. 610, 617 & n.3 (2020), that “residential telephone line” and “cellular telephone service” are not interchangeable terms under the TCPA. Other courts, like Anthony v. Brian Marketing Group, 2026 WL 2685650, at *8 (S.D. Fla. Sept. 11, 2026), Koeller v. Ox AppSec Security, Inc., No. 4:25-CV-0641-MTS, 2026 WL 2935851, at *1 (E.D. Mo. Sept. 30, 2026) and Cunningham v. Britereal Management, Inc., 2020 WL 7391693, at *7 (E.D. Tex. Nov. 20, 2020), have reached the exact same conclusion.
See the blog below where we just recently discussed the Koeller ruling.
Even more important, the court specifically said it wasn’t going to defer to older FCC guidance that might have suggested otherwise, pointing to the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369, 400-01 (2024) decision, which held that “agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.” That matters because courts must now independently work through these questions from the statutory text, rather than defer to the FCC’s 2003 interpretation. Loper Bright and McLaughlin Chiropractic Assocs., Inc. v. McKesson Corp., 606 U.S. 146, 155 (2025) makes clear that such deference is no longer warranted.
Put together, these two rulings killed the plaintiff’s do-not-call claims on two separate grounds: the texts didn’t count as calls, and the calls went to a cell phone instead of a home line. It’s not a free pass for text marketing generally, since other TCPA rules on robocalls and autodialers still apply, which is why Twilio and OpenAI stayed in the case on other counts. But for the “you texted my cell phone” theory that shows up in so many of these complaints, this ruling takes real teeth out of it.
For defense counsel, this makes Lowrey a handy citation alongside the growing stack of cases reaching the same result. For businesses that text or call customers, it’s one less thing to worry about, as long as the rest of the TCPA’s rules are still being followed.
And if “Emma” or “Nadine” call again, maybe just let it go to voicemail.
Talk to you soon TCPAWorld, and as always, be safe.