Europe

There is a compliance assumption embedded in most UK business SMS programs that the law does not support. It goes like this: we are messaging businesses, not consumers, so the stricter consent rules do not apply to us. For some recipients that is correct. For a meaningful portion of any commercial contact list, including sole traders, certain partnerships, and individuals at corporate addresses, it is wrong in ways that now carry penalties of up to £17.5 million.

The Netherlands made a deliberate choice in 2021 that most EU markets have not made. Where most countries operating under the ePrivacy Directive chose to maintain a national do-not-call registry alongside opt-out rights, the Netherlands abolished its Bel-me-niet Register entirely and replaced its opt-out telemarketing model with a mandatory opt-in. For SMS marketing, explicit consent has long been the standard under GDPR and the Dutch Telecommunications Act. The registry is gone, and the obligation to document consent before sending applies regardless of channel.

Every other market in this compliance series treats non-compliant marketing SMS as a regulatory matter: the regulator investigates, the regulator fines. Germany has an additional mechanism that most markets do not. Under the Gesetz gegen den unlauteren Wettbewerb, Germany's Act Against Unfair Competition, competitors can bring their own legal action against organizations sending marketing messages without valid consent. An unsolicited marketing SMS may trigger an Abmahnung, a formal cease-and-desist letter from a competing business, with associated legal costs and an injunction demand that must be resolved before the next campaign runs. Regulators are not the only enforcement risk. Competitors are.

Since January 1, 2023, commercial messaging platforms in France have not been permitted to send marketing SMS from numbers beginning with 06 or 07. Those are the standard French mobile number prefixes, the numbers that French recipients associate with calls and messages from real people. For commercial SMS, those numbers became unavailable to business platforms. Organizations that set up their French SMS program before that date and have not updated their routing since may be sending from numbers that are no longer permitted for commercial use.