Sometimes the number of spams I receive push my messaging close to, or even over, the cost of a monthly flat rate.

The pressure to force me to pay a monthly rate to reduce my liability to unsolicited spam drives me ever closer to a shooting rampage.

I think $90 million is a great punitive disincentive to bothering people trying to go about their personal business.

In all fairness, the best solution to this would be to stop free access to spammers. Make them shoulder the entire cost of each spam message; passing the cost onto the victims is stupid.

Furthermore, how do the current best practices help us? There is nothing to cover brands from auto dialer law suits. The guidelines go to almost extreme lengths to cater for end users, but ignore all the potential legal issues affecting brands. We can’t be the only company getting complaints that the HELP command is misleading, giving out service provider info and not stuff like opening times, directions or other stuff that is actually useful for the texter!

The defense of these accusations needs to rest with our industry associations, eg the MMA & CTIA. Why should we expect brands to foot legal defense bills in these test cases? It’s our industry at stake, which as soon as a case sets legal precedence either through a genuine case win or a simple screw up, then all companies using mobile marketing, regardless of the service is liable for a class action suit.

If texts sent out for a campaign are equated to phone calls made using an auto-dialer, MMA best practices aren’t going to protect mobile marketers from a barrage of frivolous lawsuits…and that is why this ruling is serious trouble.

No they didn’t follow ‘best practice’ guidelines which would have required the content provider (Simon & Shuster) to be identified at the front of the message and the opt out language… considering the campaign, doing so would have killed the fun and mystery aspect.

However they didn’t use an auto-dialer, they used a list of folks who, they maintain, consented to receiving marketing messages via electronic communication, including SMS, from third-parties.

While I’m not a fan of third party lists etc, if consent was given, and an auto-dialer wasn’t used, no ‘law’ was broken, just guidelines that weren’t followed.

$90 Million!?, who gets that, who benefits here, who was actually, or even theoretically, harmed…

SMS is already not seen as ’sexy’ enough by agencies, and after all how much can you charge a client for 160 characters w/ spaces, lawsuits like this is just another reason fro them to skip SMS altogether in favor of a ‘widget’ or an app etc.

The role of text messaging in MobileMarketing…from short codes anyway as the carriers seem incapable of cutting off the real source of SPAM SMS, their own SMTP gateway, is being strangled just as it was finding friends in high places.

Of course, this is only in the U.S., everywhere else is great, just as it was 7 years ago when we got started in the UK. These lawsuits are embarrassing, and they are typical… these are just the kind of lawsuits that business people all over the world cite as their #1 concern when they talk about expanding to the U.S.

I repeat, who has been harmed and who is benefiting?