Nobody Has To Do Anything By November 25

If you have had an email telling you that new federal rules on calling and texting your customers take effect on November 25, that date is not a deadline for your business. It is the date written comments are due on a proposal. We read the government's own document rather than a summary of it, and its action line says, in full, "Proposed rule." Nothing takes effect.

If you have had an email this month telling you that new federal rules about calling and texting your customers take effect on November 25, you can put it down. That date is not a deadline for your business. It is the date by which the public can send the government written comments on a proposal. We read the document instead of a summary of it. It took about twenty minutes and it is free. Our interest: we publish text-messaging terms on our own site, so we had to read this one for ourselves as well as for you. And a looming compliance deadline is the easiest thing an IT company has to sell against. We are telling you there isn't one, which is the opposite of a sales pitch, and you should weigh it accordingly. The technical part — you can skip this box The document is "Modernizing the Ability of Consumers To Control Robocalls," published in the Federal Register of Monday, October 26, 2026 by the Federal Communications Commission, the agency that regulates telephone and text messaging in the United States. Its action line reads, in full: "Proposed rule." It is a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in CG Docket No. 02-278, carrying the reference FCC 26-67, adopted September 30, 2026 and released October 1, 2026, filed as FR Doc. 2026-21820. On dates it says: "Comments are due on or before November 25, 2026, and reply comments are due on or before December 28, 2026." There is no effective date anywhere in it, because nothing in it has been adopted. The rules it describes as already in force, in its own words: callers "must honor revocation of consent requests within a reasonable time from the date that the request is made, not to exceed ten business days after receipt of the request"; callers "may now designate an exclusive, automated means by which consumers must revoke consent"; and a request sent in response to an advertising or telemarketing message "revoke[s] consent to all similar robocalls from that caller," while one sent in response to an informational message may be read as applying only to that category. What it proposes, and only proposes: shortening the ten business days to seven, requiring text senders to accept a reply text as a way of revoking consent, and requiring a single method to revoke consent for all types of message at once. None of that is a rule today. There is no small-business exemption; the document asks for comment on reducing the burden on "small business concerns with fewer than 25 employees," which is a question rather than relief. The words STOP and HELP do not appear in it anywhere. What we could not read: the Commission's own copy of the order and its document page both failed to load for us, so everything above is quoted from the Federal Register publication, which is the official legal record of the proposal. And on the widely repeated date: searching for this rule returns headlines that describe November 25 as the day the rules take effect. We read those as headlines in a list of search results. We did not open the pages, and we are not characterising anyone's article. What that actually means A proposed rule is a question, not an instruction. The government has asked what it should do. It has not told anyone to do anything. November 25 is when a comment is due, not when something changes. Nothing happens to your phone system, your texting platform or your customer list that day. The rules that apply to you today applied last month as well. They did not change, and they are not changing this month. The part that is actually good news There is nothing to do and nothing to buy. That is a rare sentence in this trade, and it is worth saying plainly rather than hedging it until it sounds like a warning. It is also worth noticing how cheap it was to establish. The document is public, free and a few pages long, and it contradicts a date that is currently everywhere. The caveat, which is a check rather than a fear The existing rules are real, and one of them has a clock on it. If somebody asks you to stop contacting them, you have ten business days to make that happen. So the check is not about November at all. It is whether anyone in your business can actually stop a message, and how fast. What to do in ten minutes If an alert gave you a date, ask which document it refers to. A real compliance date comes with a citation you can open. Find out who can stop messages to one customer. If the answer is one person and they are away next week, you have found something worth fixing. Check which messages stop. A request made in reply to marketing stops similar marketing. Appointment reminders can be a separate matter. Do not buy anything this month because of November 25. And if you get one of these emails and we handle your systems, forward it to us. Reading the actual document is a ten-minute job, and we would rather do it than have you act on somebody's summary of it.