From The Washington Post:
A consortium of consumer groups is planning to urge federal regulators to clarify how much control cellphone companies can have over the messages and services delivered over their networks.
In a petition to be filed with the Federal Communications Commission today, these groups say the agency should prohibit wireless carriers from blocking text messages sent by any company, nonprofit group or political campaign. These groups — including Public Knowledge, Free Press, Media Access Project, Consumers Union and the New America Foundation — also say carriers should deliver all text messages to their customers, including those sent by competing phone services.
“Mobile carriers currently can and do arbitrarily decide what customers to serve and which speech to allow on text messages, refusing to serve those that they find controversial or that compete with the mobile carriers’ services,” the petition says. “This type of discrimination would be unthinkable and illegal in the world of voice communications, and it should be so in the world of text messaging as well.”
Interesting. My favourite was years ago when a certain mobile carrier in Canada used to send text messages to my cell promoting their services and then they turned around and billed me for the incoming text message.
[tags]SMS Filtering, Text Message Censorship, Filtering SMS Messages, SMS Messages[/tags]
