In a move sure to rock the wireless industry, Verizon Wireless announced yesterday that they will start charging content and messaging companies a fee for sending text messages to Verizon Wireless customers.

Beginning November 1st, Verizon will charge a 3 cent per message fee for each Mobile Terminated message processed by its network. This fee will be levied on top of the current MT messaging fees (usually a fraction of a cent) already paid by companies. Talk about stifling a booming industry. These new fees will affect a whole range of text messaging services, including search results (Google), sports updates (ESPN), news alerts (CNN), auction alerts (eBay), bank account balance alerts, credit card transaction alerts, and any other company or service that want to use text messaging alerts as a value added service for their customers. Verizon claims the new fee is necessary to cover their overhead in delivering these MT messages.

via BoyGeniusReport

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I just got a formal response form Verizon

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.

Jeffrey Nelson
Executive Director, Corporate Communications
Verizon Wireless

Posted by David Ciccone, Friday, Oct. 10th, 2008

Now if that isn't one of the dumbest trends to start. Now they'll probably add a new mystery-fee to Verzion subscriber bills to cover the overhead of processing these new fees :(

Posted by benjimen@hotmail.com<---SPAMMER, Friday, Oct. 10th, 2008