Another step closer to mobile spam?

Back in September we wrote about a petition for declaratory ruling filed by Club Texting, Inc., which appeared to be anticipatorily seeking a Get Out Of FCC Jail Free card for itself and others engaging in “text broadcasting”.   Deadline alert!!!  The FCC has just invited the public to comment on that petition. In a public notice issued November 9, the Commission summarizes Club Texting’s petition, and then opens the door for the Great Unwashed to chip in their two cents’ worth. Comments on the proposal are due by November 30, reply comments by December 7.

Curiously, the FCC’s public notice does not provide a link to Club Texting’s petition. Such a link would certainly come in handy to anybody who might want to take the Commission up on its invitation to submit comments. Even more curiously, when we went out to the FCC’s ECFS to try to track down the petition, we couldn’t find it – even using the spiffy new ECFS interface. No problem – we tracked down a copy of the petition  and are providing the link, above, as a public service.

The Commission’s notice tersely echoes the general points advanced by Club Texting in its petition. What the notice doesn’t emphasize is that “text broadcasting” is pretty much the same as (or, as Club Texting describes it, the “functional equivalent” of) that scourge of the late 20th Century, junk faxing. (Not surprisingly, Club Texting prefers the more benign term, “fax broadcasting”.) Nor does the public notice mention that Club Texting is touting, on its website, the fact that it has over 60 million cellphone numbers that it can make available to its customers who might want to text their important messages to some, or all, of those 60,000,000 phones. The Commission probably didn’t mention that factoid because Club Texting didn’t mention it in its petition.

Anyway, if you feel moved to comment on Club Texting’s petition, you’ve got until November 30.