


Flanary is the chief operating officer of ccAdvertising, a company that in the past has specialized in political text messages. He got the attention of many who received text messages during the 2012 election cycle when he sent messages like:


His argument to the FCC is that it should be illegal for private businesses to block or discriminate messages they might categorize as spam. Many phone carriers blocked ccAdvertising after its election year text campaign raised the ire of subscribers who did not appreciate the texts they were receiving. But Flanary claims that, by blocking those messages, carriers violated net neutrality laws.

It is an unusual claim to the FCC considering that most Republicans generally oppose the net neutrality rules crafted by the FCC. Apparently Flanary is the exception to that rule…

Source: DailyTech



  1. 0
    kurifu says:

    In Canada, it is common for people to forget that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms applies only to persecution, legislation, and gouvernment entities in general and what constitutes a violation of human rights in private entities actually comes down to provincial human rights legislation. In Canada, this would not actually be a violation since the right to freedom of speech does not mean you can force a private person or forum to preserve, hear, or otherwise redistribute your message. I am not sure how this works in the US, but I could not imagine it being too different.

    Further, the Net Neutrality claim seems to be bunk. My understanding of net neutrality is to prevent the censoring of content in the sense that people who want his messages should be able to access them, and that the carrier cannot charge any premium for delivering his content to interested parties, and I suspect it means that the carrier cannot favour one political spammer over another, none of these seem to be in violation here.

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