• On April 5 and April 9, 2012, two mobile marketing companies filed putative class action antitrust lawsuits in the Southern District of New York against the country’s major wireless carriers, the CTIA trade association, and various text-message (or Short Message Service) aggregators. Plaintiffs, which send application-to-person (A2P) text messages on behalf of their customers, accuse the defendants of unlawfully preventing them from using normal 10-digit phone numbers to conduct their mobile marketing campaigns by instead creating and restricting such users to a system of 5- and 6-digit “common short codes,” or CSCs, for which the wireless carriers and Neustar then charged millions of dollars in fees above what would have been charged had they just been able to use 10-digit numbers. The plaintiffs allege that the wireless carriers “used their control of defendant CTIA ... to cause the CTIA to issue guidelines and rules calling for the use of five-digit (and later six-digit) CSCs for transmission of A2P SMS, inhibiting the use of standard ten-digit numbers for transmission of A2P SMS, and imposing volume limits on text messages sent from ten-digit numbers.” They further allege that the “establishment of the CSC system, which generates approximately $2.3 billion in revenues annually and continues to this day, has permitted the defendants and co-conspirator Neustar to jointly control and anti-competitively exploit the transmission of A2P SMS and to eliminate the lower-priced ten-digit telephone number alternative for use in A2P SMS transmission.” The plaintiffs, whose suits are likely to be consolidated, seek class certification, injunctive relief, treble damages, and attorneys’ fees under Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act. Club Texting, Inc. v. Cellco P’ship d/b/a Verizon Wireless, No. 12-cv-2656 (S.D.N.Y.); TextPower, Inc. v. Cellco P’ship d/b/a Verizon Wireless, No. 12-cv-2729 (S.D.N.Y.).