Text and Multimedia Messaging: Emerging Issues for Congress
"...For Congressional policymakers, two major categories of issues have arisen: (1) “same problem,
different platform” and (2) issues stemming from the difficulty in applying existing technical
definitions to a new service, such as whether a text message is sent “phone-to-phone” or using the
phone’s associated email address. There are numerous examples of each. An example of the first
category would be consumer fraud and children’s accessing inappropriate content, which have
existed previously in the “wired world,” but have now found their way to the “wireless world.”
An example of the second category would be that spam sent between two phones or from one
phone to many phones does not fall under the definition of spam in the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003
(Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, P.L. 108-187);
however, if that same message were to be sent from a phone or computer using the phone’s
associated e-mail address, it would.

The increasing use of text and multimedia messaging has raised several policy issues:
applicability of CAN-SPAM Act to unwanted wireless messages; refusal of some carriers to allow
users to disable text messaging; carrier blocking of Common Short Code messages; deceptive and
misleading Common Short Code programs; protecting children from inappropriate content on
wireless devices; “sexting”; mobile cyberbullying; and balancing user privacy with “Sunshine,”
Open Government, and Freedom of Information Laws."