Earlier this week, it was reported that T-Mobile would begin charging an extra fee to businesses sending texts over its network. They plan to charge businesses a toll of one-quarter of a cent for each text delivered through its network. The change, expected to go live on Oct 1st, would mean that services like Twitter would have to pay T-Mobile to send your texts.
ChaCha CEO Scott Jones has already commented on T-Mobile’s move using some pretty strong language: “We’re dropping T-Mobile if they do this. T-Mobile is ‘triple dipping’ here. They already make money when they charge their customers, aggregators, and publishers.”
Jones says that ChaCha’s aggregator, OpenMarket, informed the company of T-Mobile’s new fee hike, and said that because of its razor thin margins it had no choice but to pass on that fee to ChaCha, which is based in Indianapolis. (Aggregators are middlemen that stand between publishers like ChaCha, Twitter, Facebook and ESPN and the mobile subscribers they send content to.) — DailyFinance
Why You Should Care
If ChaCha is doing two million texts every day, what about Facebook? Twitter? Will they simply eat the costs associated with dealing with a single cell carrier? My guess is they will either drop T-Mobile as ChaCha has vowed to do, or pass the costs on to users somehow.
With African-Americans texting more than anyone else, this move could directly affect the community. Currently, you can still take part in the social web without an Internet connection at home or even a data plan on your phone. SMS makes it possible to engage others on the Internet with minimal tech knowledge or monetary investment. This is probably one of the reasons why 25% of Twitter users are African-American.
For T-Mobile customers, that middle-ground may be disappear as publishers figure out how to deal with the new charges. The small window that allows those without full Internet access to interact on the social web will be closed. T-Mobile has issued the following statement on the matter, which I’m surprised doesn’t end with a #kanyeshrug:
While we don’t disclose the details of our business relationships, we do want to clarify recent mischaracterizations. Business agreements with content aggregators, including messaging fees, have been common practice in the wireless industry for years. It is not accurate to characterize these business agreements as new or simply as a price increase. We believe our agreement in its entirety is a net positive for our partners.
At the end of the day, our goal is to ensure that the market for mobile data and access to mobile content thrives and that innovation can easily find its way to T-Mobile customers. We see nothing in our current business model that is counter to this goal.
Please note, there is no change to our consumer messaging or data plans.
via DailyFinance, GigaOm