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Verizon To Charge Content Providers $.03 Per SMS

Posted by timothy on from the but-there's-no-penny-slot dept.

An anonymous reader writes "It appears that Verizon is going to start double-dipping by charging both consumers AND content providers for SMS text messages. Verizon has informed content partners that it will levy a $.03 charge for messages sent to customers, effective November 1. From RCRWireless: 'Countless companies could be affected by the new fee, from players in the booming SMS-search space (4INFO, Google Inc. and ChaCha) to media companies (CNN, ESPN and local outlets) to mobile-couponing startups (Cellfire) to banks and other institutions that use mobile as an extension of customer services.'"

5 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. i used to sms a lot by circletimessquare · · Score: 4, Interesting

    but now everyone i know pretty much can email with their phones. and if not, there's an sms-email gateway, where you type their [phone number]@vzw.net or something like that. of course they have to pay for that, but if they reply, it comes in as a regular email, so you don't have to pay anything

    such that i'm thinking of shunning sms use completely

    sms is a wonderfully useful little signalling protocol... if it weren't being milked to death. so it will be discarded from general use, killed off by the phone company

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
  2. Post Office Tax by spikenerd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In the 90's there was an email circulating around claiming that the US Post Office was going to charge a fifteen cent tax on every email sent. I laughed myself silly about people that were actually stupid enough to believe it. If it ever happened, I was sure we could just encode emails so they wouldn't recognize them. Now, that I see people are actually stupid enough to *PAY* fifteen cents to send a message over the same lines on which they speak for free, it's not quite so funny anymore.

  3. cancel your verizon subscription today by blzb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    so now verizon is charging other people money to *call you*. aren't you alrady paying verizon to have a phone number just so people can call you and send you messages.

    you would have to be a real sucker to let verizon charge your friends and associates money to communicate with you, on top of what they are already paying *their* phone company to send the message in the first place.

  4. Re:They have it all wrong by svnt · · Score: 4, Interesting

    While we're pony-wishing, I want to be able to choose which companies are charged how much to send me a text message.

    Google-411: $0.00
    Verizon: $1.50

  5. *shrug* vote with your feet by Ritz_Just_Ritz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As a consumer, there are a number of carriers available. If you don't like Verizon's policies, just switch to one of the other US providers like AT&T/Sprint/T-Mobile. But this fee seems designed to soak service providers to Verizon's customers. They are much more likely to bend over and do some yodeling rather than forego the ability to sell things (or display ads/information) to Verizon customers.

    Just another in the long series of customer unfriendly business decisions made by Verizon's management.

    Cheers,