The new House bill protects consumers from abusive calls and texts by aligning with federal law, while providing tools to curb frivolous claims against businesses.

Michigan lawmakers now have two very different approaches to regulating telephone and text solicitations in front of them.

The first is Senate Bill 351. The Senate passed it unanimously in January over objections from the EIA and other business groups. It follows the Florida mini-TCPA’s original playbook: broad definitions that conflict with federal law, new consent standards found nowhere else, steep penalties and a private right of action that invites plaintiffs’ firms to sue legitimate businesses one text message at a time.  The lessons learned in Florida caused that state law to be amended to curb abusive litigation, but the Michigan Senate’s Bill 351 fails to heed those lessons.

The second approach is the Solicitation and Oversight Partnership Act, introduced this week by Rep. Rylee Linting (R. Dist. 27), as House Bill 6393. It starts from a different premise. Michigan consumers deserve protection from truly unwanted robocalls and scam texts, and the best way to deliver it is to line up with the federal rules businesses already follow, give enforcement to the Attorney General instead of the plaintiffs’ bar, and collect the data lawmakers need to make sure the law is targeting real harm and not being leveraged to manufacture claims in order to create paydays for individuals who are gaming the system.

The EIA strongly supports Rep. Linting’s bill. Here is why it is the better model for Michigan and for any state considering a mini-TCPA.

1. It tracks federal law instead of competing with it

Inconsistency is the biggest flaw in existing mini-TCPAs. When a state writes its own definitions on top of the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act and the FCC’s rules, businesses end up following two compliance regimes at once, and plaintiffs’ lawyers look for the gaps between them. After the U.S. Supreme Court narrowed the federal autodialer definition in Facebook v. Duguid (2021), Florida’s broader state definition became the basis for hundreds of lawsuits over ordinary marketing platforms that federal law doesn’t cover.

SB 351 repeats that mistake. It defines an automated dialing device as any system “used for automatically selecting or dialing telephone numbers,” which revives the pre-Duguid standard. It also creates a new consent standard, “express verifiable authorization,” that doesn’t match the federal prior express written consent rules every national brand already follows.

The Linting bill avoids both problems. Nearly every operative provision comes from the federal statute or the FCC’s rules at 47 CFR § 64.1200:

• Autodialer: The Duguid standard, covering equipment that uses a random or sequential number generator.
• Consent: Prior express written consent, the same concept used federally.
• Established business relationship: The familiar federal windows of 18 months after a purchase and 3 months after an inquiry.
• Text message: The FCC’s definition, which covers SMS and MMS and excludes IP-based messaging between users of the same app.
• Calling hours: The federal 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. window.
• Do-Not-Call safe harbor: The federal safe harbor for businesses with written procedures, trained staff and current registry data.
• Exemptions: The FCC’s exemptions for package delivery, fraud alerts, healthcare and inmate calling, including the same frequency caps and 160-character and one-minute limits.
• Caller ID and anti-spoofing: Provisions that track FCC identification rules and the Truth in Caller ID Act.

Alignment matters even more after the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in McLaughlin Chiropractic v. McKesson, which held that federal district courts are not bound by the FCC’s interpretations of the TCPA. By writing the FCC’s settled rules into state statute, businesses can know what is required of them before they get sued, rather than having courts create new policy through interpreting a vague statute through expensive, after-the-fact litigation.

2. It stops the most common abusive claims before they start

The House bill goes after the specific patterns behind today’s frivolous TCPA litigation. SB 351 does not.

Quiet hours. The EIA has fought “quiet hours” shakedown suits at the FCC and in federal courts, where plaintiffs who agreed to receive marketing texts sue because a message arrived at 8:45 p.m. SB 351 makes this worse by tying its time restrictions to local time at the subscriber’s location, which businesses can’t reliably know because federal privacy rules make it illegal for carriers to share the very data that would be needed to meet this legal standard.  The Linting bill applies calling hours only to “telephone solicitations,” and it excludes messages to people who gave prior express written consent or who have an established business relationship. A customer who asked to hear from a business can’t then use the fact that their phone has an area code from another part of the country as a basis to sue over messages that they asked to receive.

Opt-outs. The House bill adopts the FCC’s revocation keywords (stop, quit, end, revoke, opt-out, cancel and unsubscribe) and the 10-business-day deadline to honor them. It also lets businesses designate a reasonable exclusive opt-out method, consistent with the revocation reforms the FCC is moving to adopt. That removes the arguments over whether an ambiguous reply was meant as an opt-out, which fuels so many demand letters.

Consent-and-sue. A person who gave prior express written consent must revoke it before filing a complaint. This incorporates the changes that the Florida legislature made to curb the litigation abuse its original mini-TCPA provoked in that state, closing off the tactic of signing up for messages specifically to stockpile them in order to complain about them later.

3. It relies on AG enforcement, not a redundant private right of action

The two bills differ most sharply on enforcement.

SB 351 creates a private right of action worth $1,000 per violation plus attorney fees, and the Senate rejected an amendment to remove it. It also authorizes Attorney General fines of up to $25,000 per violation, rising as high as $100,000 for violations involving vulnerable residents. Each text can count as a separate violation, so one technical misstep in a campaign to a subscriber list could carry exposure that bankrupts a small Michigan brand.

This duplicates rights consumers already have. The federal TCPA already provides a private right of action with statutory damages of $500 to $1,500 per call or text. Adding a second state-law claim doesn’t stop more robocalls. It doubles the exposure for each message and gives plaintiffs’ firms a second set of counts to plead against the same conduct. Experience in Florida and elsewhere shows these lawsuits mainly hit legitimate businesses, while the offshore and spoofing operations behind real robocall abuse stay out of reach.

The Linting bill makes violations a state civil infraction with fines of up to $500 and puts enforcement with the Attorney General. The AG can prioritize real bad actors, send cease-and-desist letters, bring cases, refer residents to their federal remedies and refer carriers and VoIP providers to the FCC. Consumers keep every right they have today, and Michigan gets public enforcement without an extra layer of private litigation.

4. It builds in accountability and data for future improvements

Mini-TCPA debates, including the Senate’s, have mostly happened without any real data and instead rely on anecdotal conversations. Legislators hear about complaint volume but have no way of knowing how many complaints reflect real harm and how many are driven by litigation.

The Linting bill changes that. Within a year of enactment, the Attorney General must set up a complaint process that, importantly, also provides a vehicle for businesses to submit information in response to frivolous complaints made against them by serial litigators and plaintiff’s attorneys who manufacture litigation. The AG must then report annually to the House and Senate consumer protection committees on:

• complaint volume over the previous five years
• cease-and-desist letters sent, cases filed, final orders entered and fines collected
• how many residents were told the AG would not pursue their complaint, and how quickly
• referrals to federal authorities, including carriers referred to the FCC
• recommendations for additional authority, funding or technical resources, backed by data
• the number of frivolous complaints reported, along with proposals to reduce them

That last item is key and one that EIA championed. No other state mini-TCPA requires the enforcing agency to track abuse of the law itself. By counting frivolous complaints alongside legitimate ones, the bill treats harm to businesses as part of the policy record, not just harm to consumers. The AG must also hold a public consultation within 120 days of enactment, which gives consumers and businesses a structured voice from the start.

The two bills side by side

A better path forward

Michigan doesn’t have to choose between protecting residents from unwanted calls and protecting local businesses from litigation abuse. SB 351 offers new liability without new protection, completely failing to acknowledge the litigation abuse that has impacted businesses nationwide. The Solicitation and Oversight Partnership Act offers protection with accountability: federal alignment so compliance is clear, enforcement by the Attorney General instead of private litigants, and data the Legislature can use to keep improving the law.

The EIA thanks Rep. Linting for her leadership. We urge the House to advance his bill as Michigan’s approach to telephone and text solicitation, and we encourage legislators in other states to use it as their model.

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Ecommerce Innovation Alliance provides members with analysis of litigation and regulatory developments affecting online commerce and digital marketing. This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Members with questions about their specific practices should consult counsel.