Verizon To Charge Content Providers $.03 Per SMS

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.'"

email?

[mangu (126918)]

Did they send an email informing everyone of this?

Re:email?

[spazdor (902907)]

If they did, I'm charging them to read it.

Re:email?

[Ethanol-fueled (1125189)]

They're doing it to raise money to pay for their defense fund when the lawsuits from those angry security professionals come pourin' in.

Re:email?

[spazdor (902907)]

I'll be glad to take your lawsuits, guys! Once we get the new Litigation Surcharge out of the way.

That'll be 99 cents per dollar that you're seeking in damages, plz.

Re:email?

[madhurms (736552)]

More importantly, is it 0.03 dollar or 0.03 cents? :)

Re:email?

[maniac/dev/null (170211)]

they're the same thing, sir.

I canceled

[dj245 (732906)]

I canceled my Verizon Wireless yesterday (for other reasons). If you want out of your contract with no questions asked, print out This page [verizonwireless.com] and take it in with you to the verizon office. Tell them this is a change to your contract and that you would like to cancel. Ask them to waive the cancel fee. Done. You even get to keep your phone (they told me to sell it on Ebay). This assumes that you were a customer back in April.

They have it all wrong

[Bryansix (761547)]

ONLY the sender should be charged for SMS. You can't choose which ones you receive so why should you pay for them?

Re:They have it all wrong

[spazdor (902907)]

You seem to be under the misapprehension that Verizon has some sort of policy regarding "fairness".

They also charge you for incoming calls. Even if they're wrong numbers.

Also I hear that 0.02 = 0.0002.

Re:They have it all wrong

[Hadlock (143607)]

That's a bald faced lie. I've spent countless hours arguing with sprint to even remove the cost of ONE spam text message, let alone wrong numbers. Fuck sprint. I jumped ship the day my contract expired. Good fucking riddance to that garbage company. May they evaporate as the stock market does!!!

Re:They have it all wrong

[svnt (697929)]

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

i used to sms a lot

[circletimessquare (444983)]

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

Post Office Tax

[spikenerd (642677)]

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.

Just crazy...

[apathy maybe (922212)]

I never understood the "pay to receive" idea in the first place.

Anyway, in Australia (at least with one of the companies), you have two types of message. The ones that someone sends to you, and they pay for it. Then there are "premium" services (such as weather, news, games whatever), which you pay to request.

Charging to send AND receive? Greedy bastards should be lined up against the wall and shot.

Viva le revolution!

cancel your verizon subscription today

[blzb (311781)]

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.

Re:cancel your verizon subscription today

[value_added (719364)]

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.

I don't how this differs from the way the real world works.

Verizon is a Las Vegas hotel room. Blackjack may be included, but the hookers and gratuities to both the bellhop and the hookers aren't.

Another example of US telcos acting dumb on SMS

[99luftballon (838486)]

What is it with US telcos and SMS. SMS was an accidental hit in Europe; an engineering tool that people discovered and used free. Now the telcos over there have modest charges for sending it and rake in billions each year. But in the US first they tried to charge for sending and receiving, then massively increased the cost and now this. What is it US telcos have against SMS, I genuinely don't understand?

*shrug* vote with your feet

[Ritz_Just_Ritz (883997)]

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,

Re:*shrug* vote with your feet

[Ron_Fitzgerald (1101005)]

Unfortunately 'voting with your feet' doesn't work in these instances as all the major players follow suit soon after.

Re:Email to Text?

[COMON$ (806135)]

Ya but dont forget that that e-mail to txt is MORE expensive as you need a data plan. oh and data plans for alltel went up to about $44 a month to match their competitors. Either way the cell companies are gouging us on a service that we already pay for. Check it out:

You pay a service contract fee for a data line.

You pay an extra fee for using that data line to send SMS messages

You pay and extra fee to use that data line to send http, pop, smtp, https traffic

You pay an extra fee on top of that if you want to use that data line to connect a computer

All at fees that are going up exponentially while cost per bit goes down for the company, I would love to see those margins. This is what is going to happen to your internet service soon people.

Re:Email to Text?

[GenP (686381)]

Blackberry on T-Mobile, $55/mo for basic voice and unlimited data, no contract. No SMS either, but that's where the unlimited data comes in.

Re:Email to Text?

[Drathos (1092)]

He's not talking about emailing from your phone. He's talking about sending an email to your phone that gets delivered as a text message. Big difference. There's no data plan involved.

Verizon will send a text message to my phone if someone sends an email to <my number>@vtext.com and happily charge me for it, even if it's spam. There's no way for them to charge the sender.

Re:Timing is suspect

[xant (99438)]

I think it's safe to say that Verizon and its little friends are big fans of the current surveillance-friendly administration, seeing as how the W administration just gave the telcos the world's largest "Get Out Of Jail Free" card with their little "retroactive immunity" bill.

*sigh* Obama voted for it. (I'm voting for him anyway.)

Of course, I'm suspicious of the way gas prices suddenly drop in October of years divisible by 4, too. :)

They drop every October. Every September, too. People drive more in the summer.

Re:Timing is suspect

[CajunArson (465943)]

Hey Pal! Stop posting facts to counteract Slashdot's Messiah Worship / conspiracy theory groove thing!

Re:Greed

[Hatta (162192)]

A fair price would be the same as all other data transfers. It's all bits anyway. You should pay the same price for a given number of bits, no matter what protocol you're using.