FCC ‘loophole’ may force mobile users to pay for political text ads

There is a firestorm over a Virginia marketing firm that allegedly flooded mobile devices with political text messages. But lost in the media coverage is the price some consumers might pay if they lack unlimited texting plansand whether free speech will keep the practice alive.

TextingThe controversy is about a large number of text messages originating from websites tied to a marketing firm called ccAdvertising. On October 30, Washington, D.C., residents received the messages in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

The messages werent storm updates: They were short missives attacking Barack Obamas presidential campaign and his stance on same-sex marriage and abortion. And they were showing up on mobile phones apparently at random.

Enough messages were received by reporters in the D.C. area to cause them to look up the owners of the websites and link them to ccAdvertising.

But anyone following the issue of political text messages wouldnt have been surprised at the tactic, since the firms owner said just a week ago such campaigns were just an another example of free speech, and permissible under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

Gabriel Joseph told the website Campaigns & Elections on October 25 that he was taking part in an FCC review of the practice, and that any action that banned the mass messaging campaigns was unconstitutional and against the intent of the First Amendment.

Such efforts take away Americans free speech rights that are now protected by current law, FCC regulations and the Constitution of the United States, Joseph told Campaigns & Elections.

What Joseph calls his constitutional right is labeled an FCC loophole by his opponents.

The controversy is about the practice called email-to-text messaging. It uses websites, instead of texting services, to send an outgoing email to someones cellphone number as a text message. It looks like a text message to the person who receives it, and the FCC doesnt bar such messages as spam in its current regulations.

The rub, says Campaigns & Elections, is that ccAdvertising claims people who have unlimited texting plans arent paying for the messages, so they are permissible under the TCPA.

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FCC ‘loophole’ may force mobile users to pay for political text ads