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When the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) was first passed by Congress in 1991, it immediately earned the ire of the telemarketing industry. While it’s certainly not the most litigated federal law in the U.S., it has generated its share of court action, punitive fees and awards for aggrieved parties. A lack of clarity regarding automated outbound calling (a/k/a “robocalling”) has been settled through amendments to the original TCPA as well as federal court cases. Last year, Capital One (News - Alert) Financial Corp. and several of its business partners paid a record-breaking $75.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit pending in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The suit alleged that the companies used robocalling to call customers’ cellphones without consent.

In essence, for-profit companies may not call consumers with prerecorded outbound voice messages unless they have the customers’ prior written consent. (Before a clarification by the FCC (News - Alert) last year, many companies attained only verbal consent.) Charities raising funds and marketing companies conducting research are exempt from the rules, as are one other group that benefits enormously from robocalling: politicians.

While American politicians ensured that they themselves would be exempt from the rules prohibiting unsolicited outbound calling, the FCC hopes to give Americans sick and tired of political robocalls some relief. The agency, which oversees the TCPA in conjunction with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC (News - Alert)), is encouraging phone carriers and telecom companies to embrace technologies that allow consumers to block robocalls. Pollsters and political campaign professionals are crying foul, according to a recent article by Politico’s Steven Shepard.

“As a result, they say, Americans might soon know much less about what they think about everything from which candidates are gaining or losing ground to what issues voters care about most,” he wrote. “And political campaigns might be forced to abandon tools they currently use to reach large numbers of voters in a short period of time.”

Complaints about robocalls are the number one reason why Americans reach out to the FCC. For its part, the agency is asking telephone companies to offer services to their customers that block calls placed by an automatic dialer. It would appear that Americans are dreading the influx of annoying, misleading and even mean-spirited calls that are about to flood their homes and cellphones.

Political interests are already asking to be exempted from the blocking technologies, though most of these technologies work by detecting calling patterns and “blacklisted” phone numbers known to be the sources of robocalls, so it’s not clear how phone companies could be expected to know the difference between political robocalls and other types.

The FCC seems unlikely to cave in to campaigners’ demands. Last week, agency chair Tom Wheeler (News - Alert) blogged that it will grant telemarketing-weary Americans’ wishes.

“The FCC wants to make it clear: Telephone companies can — and in fact should — offer consumers robocall-blocking tools,” he wrote.