Verizon hit us up yesterday to let us know that what we reported the other day was just something being tossed around internally. It was not final. They’ve clarified their position on raising text messaging fees for content providers for us.
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.
Couldn’t make it through all that? No problem, we will summarize it for you, “This document was not for the public. It was meant for internal business discussion in regards to content aggregators. (Think sports scores, constant text updates, etc.) This is only a proposal and not a final decision to implement. We secretly love BGR.” Hey, maybe they forgot about that leaked Storm thing already…
