Found this article at the
sfgate.com and i want it really crazy and unthinkable. I just cant understand why verizon will think this way. But anywayz, just read below:
Quote:
If you missed the incident, Verizon Wireless initially refused to transmit text messages over its cellular network from Naral Pro-Choice America, a pro-choice group, to its members. Naral uses text-messaging to update its supporters on pro-choice policy and the message would have only gone to people who had signed up to receive them. But several days later, Verizon did an about-face and agreed to send the messages. Nonetheless, according to news reports, Verizon did not retreat from its position that it is entitled to decide what messages to transmit. This is censorship of the first magnitude.
Verizon's position is wrong because if you make a voice call using your cell phone instead of creating a text message neither Verizon nor any other carrier would assert that they then have the right to decide whether or not to transmit your message. Type out the message on your cell phone keypad and Verizon says it has the right to block it; speak the same words into the microphone and they can't. Logical? No.
The providing of voice communications is legally treated as common carriage: the telephone carrier must provide phone service and cannot censor what a customer says. However, Verizon apparently believes it can censor text messages because under federal communications law text messaging services are not treated as common carriage but rather as information services.
In the 1960s, the Federal Communications Commission, prodded by the likes of IBM in an effort to keep AT&T from entering the computer and information services markets, decreed that certain communications services - such as text messaging - were not common carrier services but instead information services. The result is the common carrier principles do not apply to information services such as text messaging.
The rationale for the distinction - the threat of AT&T dominance in the computer and information services industry - used when the information services classification was created just doesn't hold up today. Instead, the effect of this archaic rule is to give Verizon and other carriers the power to decide whether or not to transmit your message based on its content. This is the exercise of censorship power plain and simple, and except for the imminent perpetration of crimes against persons or property, the carriers should not hold a power denied to our government. The carriers will respond that even though the rationale used in the '60s for the distinction may not apply today, there are still good reasons to treat text messaging and other information services differently from voice telecommunications. Maybe. But if that classification means the carriers can censor messages at their discretion - as Verizon claims - the scale tips against them.
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