Corporate censorship

How is this not a violation of the First Amendment?

Saying it had the right to block “controversial or unsavory” text messages, Wireless has rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon’s mobile network available for a text-message program.

There has long been an unresolved Constitutional question regarding the degree of censorship that private companies may exercise on public speech. But most cases dealing with this issue have concerned speech over privately owned networks. What makes this different is a portion of Verizon’s network resides on the publicly owned transmission spectrum and it would seem to me that in that arrangement, Verizon must be considered a common carrier and, therefore, prevented by law from discriminating. Time for Congress to take another crack at a net neutrality law.

UPDATE: Verizon has reversed its text message policy.

But the company reversed course this morning, saying it had made a mistake.

“The decision to not allow text messaging on an important, though sensitive, public policy issue was incorrect, and we have fixed the process that led to this isolated incident,” Jeffrey Nelson, a company spokesman, said in a statement.