The Council struggles to reduce the price of text messages and to cancel the limitation on the number of characters for a single message
The ICC is currently waging a campaign against unreasonable profit margins within the Israeli economy. As part of this campaign, the ICC has come out against the price of sending text messages, which the various cell phone companies charge their customers.
The ICC claims that the marginal cost of sending a text message to the cell phone companies is estimated at no more than 0.05 NIS (NIS 3.5=$ 1). On the other hand, the cell phone companies charge between 0.2 and 0.6 NIS per a single text message.
The CEO of the ICC, Adv. Ehud Peleg, further stated that this overcharging is even more severe considering the fact that the cell phone companies limit the length of one single text message to 70 characters which includes spaces and punctuation marks. That way, the cell phone companies can charge their clients twice or more, even though the customer sends the message in a single action.
Adv. Peleg sent a written request to the Minister of Communications asking him to order the cellular companies to remove the limit of the number of characters for a single text message.
Adv. Peleg:" The only way to protect the public from the businesses tendency to maximize profits from services in a market of limited competition, is through regulatory intervention".
