Wireless spam on its way to the U.S.

WASHINGTON -- Coming soon to a cell phone near you: text-based advertisements.

Panelists on the second day of a three-day spam forum sponsored by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission agreed Thursday that text-based advertisements, already common in Japan and Europe, are coming to U.S. users of wireless devices, and that some of those messages, inevitably, will be spam.

While some panelists said current U.S. laws are inadequate for dealing with wireless spam, members of the cell phone industry said they're already taking steps to avoid the influx of spam that's saturated the "wired" Internet.

Unlike the free-for-all Internet, wireless carriers are treating their networks like private property and planning to kill off bulk text messages at gateways before they hit customer in-boxes.

Mobile marketing, as legitimate wireless advertising is called, "has not taken off yet, but it's scheduled to take off," said Jim Manis, chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association. Mobile marketing, Manis predicted, will eventually become an $8 billion industry.

Manis predicted U.S. users will soon be able to download discount coupons for coffee or other products to their cell phones by calling a number on a billboard.

Michael Altschul, senior vice president for policy and administration at the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA), noted that major cell phone carriers have already put systems in place to block inbound text messages that contain the same string of words and are sent to multiple users.

The economics for spammers in the wireless world are different from those of the wired Internet: wireless carriers typically charge a fee per text message sent, making wireless spam less economical than e-mail spam.

"So it is possible to send spam to wireless users, but if the system works as intended, only one or two messages at a time will go through," Altschul said. "The process is so cumbersome that it does not become a problem for users."

Still, the popularity of text messaging on cellular devices is growing by leaps and bounds, from 14.4 million text messages sent to the subscribers of CTIA members in December 2000, to more than 1 billion text messages sent in the same month in 2002.

With the increase in text messaging will come increased interest from marketers in reaching those customers, including some who try to send unsolicited commercial text advertisements, panelists said.

Rodney Joffe, who started an Arizona lawsuit against a marketing company after receiving two unsolicited ads on his cell phone in 2001, said he doesn't want the "genie to get out of the bottle," like e-mail spam did while the industry debated what to do about it in the mid-1990s.

"I was determined not to allow it to become something that didn't kill the benefits of cell phones," said Joffe, explaining the reason for his lawsuit.