Innocent Until Proven Guilty — Or Not

Article by Christian Dippon¹

Introduction

On 9 September 2008, US Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI), chairman of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, sent a letter to the CEOs of Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile (the four largest US mobile carriers) demanding an explanation for recent price increases for text messaging. Text messaging is a rather broad term that means sending messages from one device to another using a wireless technology and includes services such as short message service (often called SMS), email, instant messaging, Internet access, voice SMS (where the text is converted to voice), text-to-landline SMS (where the text is also converted to voice), and the sending of content (e.g., pictures or video messaging). Senator Kohl appears to be questioning only the prices of SMS, which is just one form of text messaging. This distinction is crucial as there is a significant difference in the use of SMS and other forms of messaging such as