Public Knowledge is a Washington, D.C.-based public interest group working to defend citizens' rights in the emerging digital culture. They have filed an important petition with the FCC:
Text messaging is a part of everyday life for people—a fast and convenient form of communication useful in every situation. Because of its importance, in 2007 Public Knowledge and others filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission asking that it clarify that text messaging is subject to the same nondiscrimination rules as voice communications.
You can learn more about the petition (and sign on) @ http://www.publicknowledge.org/issues/text-message-petition
So why is this an issue? Let's look at an article in yesterday's New York Times:
When the earthquake devastated Haiti, Catholic Relief Services tried to gather contributions for its efforts using the hottest trend in giving: donations via cellphone.
But the charity wanted to try a twist on the technology: when people sent a text message to donate, they got a reply offering to connect them via phone to the charity’s call center. The group hoped that the calls could build a stronger bond with donors, and garner larger contributions as well.
But just three days into the effort after the Jan. 12 earthquake, the charity got word that Sprint Nextel was demanding that the “text-to-call” effort be shut down. The charity had 40 days to abandon the feature or lose access to millions of Sprint customers.
Sprint’s original motivations are murky; it said that an intermediary company had failed to properly fill out a form to verify that it was dealing with a legitimate charity.
The conflict underscores a problem that public interest groups asked the Federal Communications Commission to address more than two years ago: the hazy legal status of text messages, which are controlled by telephone companies without any real government oversight. The laws that prohibit phone companies from interfering with voice calls do not apply to text messages, a fast-growing medium.
“We should be able to communicate with people the way they want to be communicated with, not the way the phone company wants them to be communicated with,” said Jed Alpert, a founder of Mobile Commons, the company that connects Catholic Relief Services and 100 other nonprofit organizations with text messaging networks.
Read more @ The New York Times.
Check out the petition here.
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