Catholic Charity and Sprint Tangle Over Texting

When the earthquake devastated Haiti, Catholic Relief Services tried to gather contributions for its efforts using the hottest trend in giving: donations via cellphone. But the charity wanted to try a twist on the technology: when people sent a text message to donate, they got a reply offering to connect them via phone to the charity's call center. The group hoped that the calls could build a stronger bond with donors, and garner larger contributions as well. But just three days into the effort after the Jan. 12 earthquake, the charity got word that Sprint Nextel was demanding that the "text-to-call" effort be shut down. The charity had 40 days to abandon the feature or lose access to millions of Sprint customers. Sprint's original motivations are murky; it said that an intermediary company had failed to properly fill out a form to verify that it was dealing with a legitimate charity. The conflict underscores a problem that public interest groups asked the Federal Communications Commission to address more than two years ago: the hazy legal status of text messages, which are controlled by telephone companies without any real government oversight. The laws that prohibit phone companies from interfering with voice calls do not apply to text messages, a fast-growing medium.

M. Chris Riley, who serves as policy counsel for Free Press, a media policy and advocacy group in Washington that participated in the 2007 filing, suggested that Sprint might be legitimately concerned about people using the text-to-call method to flood consumers with unwanted calls or messages. However, he said, problems emerge for legitimate organizations like Catholic Relief Services when the telephone company, with its control over the market, "is being insufficiently flexible or categorically eliminating a range of communications because sometimes they result in spam." Harold Feld, legal director for Public Knowledge, a public policy group in Washington that also joined the 2007 filing, said that even though customers of other carriers would not be directly affected by a Sprint shutdown, companies and nonprofits would be reluctant to lose access to so many potential recipients of their messages. The effect, he said, is that "you discourage anyone from innovating." Both groups are planning new filings based on this conflict.