Congress to cell carriers..."I am concerned with whether this consolidation and increased market power by the major carriers has contributed to this doubling of text-messaging rates over the last three years," wroteKohl, who gave the carriers a month to justify their higher SMS rates.

U.S. texters sent 2.5 billion SMS messages in June—each day, mind you, or 78 billion messages for the month.

That's a staggering 160-percent increase over last year, the CTIA reports—as well as a lot of money for the carriers, who collectively raked in $14.8 billion in wireless data revenue in the first half of 2008.

This is the future of John McCain's America.