Text Messaging Featured Article

It was a few months ago, back in September, that several big name Internet companies decided to show a lot of spinning wheels as a protest to block Internet service providers from providing "fast lanes" to sites that pay more, which is something that FCC chairman Tom Wheeler (News - Alert) has considered allowing within commercially reasonable bounds.

We have seen the argument heat up with a lot of politicians taking a stance on net neutrality. The principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet in an equal way is referred to as net neutrality, sometimes also referred to as network neutrality, or Internet neutrality. This means neither discriminating nor charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment and modes of communication.

It would appear that data speed is not the only issue involved, earlier this year a company whose goal is to find ways to improve the way people communicate, found that Verizon (News - Alert) made it impossible for their customers to communicate. HeyWire Business is a 35-person company that gives businesses a way to receive text messages or Short Message Service (SMS) on their toll-free 800 numbers. At least they did until April 13, 2014.

Going on the assumption that there was a hardware problem, Gene Lew, the company’s chief technology officer, looked into possible causes. What he found out after a lot of digging was that there was no problem. The company discovered that with neither advance warning, nor follow-up information, Verizon turned off the switch that allowed HeyWire to offer its services.

Verizon told HeyWire that it was changing the way it handled the company’s traffic. Meredith Flynn-Ripley (News - Alert), who is HeyWire’s CEO was told by Verizon that “There’s a new set of fees. There’s a new set of rules. And you’ll have to create a new business relationship to be able to let our customers text your company.'” As you can imagine, we are looking at a serious problem for a companies like HeyWire.

At the beginning of August, Tom Wheeler stated his concerns, in what is considered to be a strongly-worded letter that he was not happy about Verizon’s plan to start slowing down customers on unlimited data plans beginning in October. This type of slowdown is referred to as “throttling.”

Unfortunately, part of this issue began earlier this year when Wheeler proposed new rules that referred to Open Internet. At the time, consumer advocacy groups criticized the rules for creating fast and slow lanes on the web. The proposed rules would ban Internet Service Providers from blocking or slowing down users' access to websites but allow them to charge content companies for faster and more reliable delivery of traffic to users.

That is exactly what Verizon did with HeyWire. Citing a non-disclosure agreement, Flynn-Ripley cannot reveal what rules Verizon put in place and what fees the carrier is charging her company. However, what she feels is the real problem is the fact that Verizon has unfair control over how her business operates.

HeyWire is not the only company to offer texting services and they all seem to be in the same boat. In fact, following this incident AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile have either already implemented have proposed similar changes to their policies.  As Flynn-Ripley states, “We believe these new rules and fees go well beyond the fast and slow lane debate of net neutrality. This is about operators unilaterally blocking access for individuals or entire… providers with really little or no notice. This is censorship.”

For some reason SMS seems to fall into an unregulated no man’s land. What began as a quick way for people to send short notes to each other has evolved into a platform that companies such as HeyWire, Twillo, Google (News - Alert) and Microsoft use to link together other applications.

Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson said that the big carriers are laying down new fees and rules to text companies, but there does seem to be an exception. The big carriers aren’t laying down new fees and rules for each other. Lawson said “The tier-one carriers have started to add additional costs to messages that go into their networks that they are asking over-the-top companies such as Twilio or HeyWire or Google or Microsoft (News - Alert) to pay when the other tier one carriers do not have the same fees.”

The major service providers are constantly looking for ways to maintain, or more so, increase their revenue. Is bringing SMS into the net neutrality battle the way to handle it? According to Lawson, “If we don’t have some form of net neutrality, the future could look a lot more like SMS, where the carriers get to decide what is an appropriate use case.”