Verizon has added a 3-cent fee for all mobile-terminated messages delivered across its network
beginning Nov. 1. An email was sent by Verizon partner
OpenMarket.
This change will affect the mobile content providers who rely on text for their business. Mobile content providers and aggregators are concerned the rate increase will
cause advertisers to eliminate their text programs. Verizon says that they need to cover costs.
This story is worth following because Verizon seems to haven gotten so much "bad" press they sent out an official statement and give their two cents worth of opinion you can read by clicking on continue reading.
This 3 cents issues must have caused a big stink. Verizon's vice president of communications sent the media the following email (he probably didn't want to send it as text, because it would cost too much,)
Know you've been interested in the issue of texting and potential cost increases for the for-profit aggregators.
Wanted you to see our current statement:
As Verizon Wireless continues to review the competitive marketplace, we constantly work to provide additional value to our customers, employees and other stakeholders.
We are currently assessing how to best address the changing messaging marketplace, and are communicating with messaging aggregators, our valued content partners, our technology business partners and, importantly, our friends in the non-profit and public policy arenas.
To that end, we recently notified text messaging aggregators - those for-profit companies that provide services to content providers to aggregate and bill for their text messaging programs - that we are exploring ways to offset significantly increased costs for delivering billions upon billions of text messages each month.
Specific information in one proposal, which would impose a small per-message fee on for-profit content aggregators for commercial messages, has been mistakenly characterized as a final decision to implement. We don't envision this type of change to in any way affect non-profit organizations or political and advocacy organizations.
We have not increased the per-message cost to aggregators since our messaging service began in 2003, and we have never envisioned a cost to consumers or content companies, but rather on content aggregators themselves. That draft was intended to stimulate internal business discussions and in no way should have been been released to the public and represented as a final document.
At Verizon Wireless, we strive to provide our messaging customers with maximum value, and work to implement business decisions that encourage the use of messaging between individuals and organizations in both the marketplace of ideas and the commercial marketplace, and we will continue to strongly encourage the use of our services by charitable organizations as they perform their good works.
Jeffrey Nelson
Executive Director, Corporate Communications
Verizon Wireless