Verizon vs. Pro-Abortion Group

My response to a comment left about the recent Verizon issue:

What do you think about the recent news about Verizon refusing to allow NARAL-Pro Choice America to use its service for some sort of campaign? This made big news, then within days, Verizon changed its mind and decided to work with the pro-abortion group. What do you think about that?

-hobbiewho

This is an interesting issue. From my point of view there are several values at stake here. If you asked me if I morally agreed with Verizon’s actions, I’d tell you that I think it’s ridiculous that they’d prohibit speech that is intended for those whom have signed up to receive these texts.

Legally though, the company is probably within its rights to ban this type of transmittance. Verizon has said that they have traditionally avoided “advocacy issues” like abortion or war. It’s a private company and it can do what it wants. The 1st amendment protects speech from government censorship only.

This is why the salient point here is that this is mostly a business issue. First and foremost, Verizon is a business whose sole objective is their bottom line. We must consider whether the company made a smart business decision by banning this type of speech from its network. This is a perfect example of the beauty of free markets. Verizon made a decision that was based on something other than profit and the market spoke. Who knows if it would have picked up steam, but why risk alienating millions of paying customers by taking a toothless moral stand? Should they also ban people from having phone conversations about this topic on their network?

It’s similar to the recent NY Times controversy over the MoveOn.org ad. The Times was well within its rights to run the ad, but ultimately it was a bad business decision. It only served to bring more attention to the charge that it’s a partisan organization for allowing anti-war advocacy advertising, but not pro-life advertising, with which it editorially disagrees. Was the Times legally wrong? Nope. Did they make a bad business move? Yep.