Taking money out of customer's pockets

It's an old article but I came across this report from Ucann today who were filing a suit against cellphone operators in California on the basis that customers were charged to receive text messages, and hence spam to their phone costs them money.

The American method of charging to receive phone calls always blew my mind, being used as I was to the English method of people calling cellphones (or mobiles as we call them) being charged a premium to connect. Then I came to realise that actually it makes a lot of sense: me, the user of the cellphone, pays for the benefits of being in contact with people all the time and there is a flat fee for calls to any area code (US phones use normal area codes, whereas European phones have special, cellphone 'area' codes). Of course what doesn't make sense is per minute billing, so if someone calls me by mistake for only a few seconds, I get charged for a minute which may well be at a peak rate but that's a whole different story.

You can then see how the US Operators' minds would work.. "we charge people to receive calls... so we should charge them to receive texts. Simple. Plus we get to make even more money off customers. Yeah!" Of course where this falls down is that people are charged to send a text in general, I mean, would you expect to pay postage on a letter you received? No.

Personally I believe this should change: inbound messages should be free, pure and simple. Of course this also raises an issue that US operators still allow people to send emails that get converted to SMS - so who would pay for that? Oh yeah. The people who received the message. That makes 'sense', especially considering it is generally much easier to spam through email than getting the necessary technology in place to send a proper SMS. Of course operators do shut down 'spammers' when they send too much email SMS, as witnessed by T-mobile blocking TxtMob during the Republican convention a few years back.

Let's see what happens...

Ps, in a similar Ucann post here's some info on your rights regarding ringtones & wallpaper downloads.