Note: mobileStorm does not, in any way, condone the sale or use of illegal substances.

By now, everyone’s heard of the frat-boy drug busts at San Diego State University. Most people were shocked at the scope of the narcotics networks. Not to mention the homeland security aspirations of one arrestee—which kind of underscores the folly of the “wars” on drugs and terrorism. But the silver lining here is for digital message marketers: It’s a chance to see how SMS marketing can be effective for the widest variety of, er, industries.

According to investigators, the accused dealers sent out at least one mass text-message to their database of satisfied customers, offering a special sale on cocaine. Said the SMS message (exact grammar/punctuation/spelling intact): “Attn faithful customers both myself and my associates will be in vegas this coming weekend bad news is we will not be here to complete sales good news is from Now to until midnight thursday gs are 35 eights 110 quads 210 so stock up, we will be back Sunday night.”

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It’s inevitable with any new form of marketing that after awhile U.S. laws and regulations will be established both to protect consumers and limit what exactly constitutes an acceptable message. It had happened first with print, then voice, then fax, then email and now the cycle continues with mobile messaging. In the past few months, the most of the major carriers have either implemented or tightened their restrictions on mobile marketing and this trend shows no signs of abating any time soon.

In one sense, these new requirements actually point to a rapidly maturing mobile marketing industry. The last couple of years were essentially the testing and proving grounds for text messaging, mobile content and most recently mobile search. Companies were largely in an experimental mode, trying out various combinations of mobile campaigns to see what worked and what didn’t. Now, in 2008, these companies have largely settled on the types of mobile initiatives they want to implement and are starting to launch such programs in earnest.

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Earlier this month, Judge James B. Zagel became part of the email marketing industry’s history with his ruling on the landmark e360 Prospect vs. Comcast case. In his decision, Zagel dismissed all of e360’s claims outright, while keeping in play Comcast’s countersuit against the company. Ouch.

To me, the most fascinating of e360’s four charges was that by Comcast blocking their emails from being received by its subscribers, the ISP was essentially in violation of the First Amendment and the right to free speech. Interestingly enough, the judge agreed that “the idea of blocking seems at odds in some way with free speech protection, even though there are limits imposed on the free speech protection of commercial speech, which is, I infer, the principal, if not the only, business of e360.”

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We’re no closer to reconciling concerns about the use of online behavior data. Indeed, several things happened over the past week proving that marketers, controllers of Internet information, and consumers aren’t likely to agree any time soon on the use of online-behavior information.

Because of concerns by both consumers and the government, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) late last year created guidelines to help the marketing industry self-regulate itself in the behavioral ad targeting space (see the proposed principals). Last week, in response to the FTC’s proposed rules, various industry groups and individual businesses said the FTC was too broadly defining “behavioral information.”

Marketers don’t have a problem with protecting personally-identifying details like names, physical and email addresses, and phone numbers. But the FTC, they said, does not do enough in its proposed guidelines to distinguish between this type of information and so-called “non-personally-identifiable information,” or N-PII, which is anonymous user data. N-PII is the information used by behavior-based technology to decide what kind of ad to display onscreen.

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