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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.

“We should be able to communicate with people the way they want to be communicated with, not the way the phone company wants them to be communicated with,” said Jed Alpert, a founder of Mobile Commons, the company that connects Catholic Relief Services and 100 other nonprofit organizations with text messaging networks.

The texting fight parallels a broader conflict over who controls the information flowing through data pipelines, a long-running dispute that has come to be known as net neutrality.

“This issue is floating in a regulatory limbo — no one knows what the rules are,” said Susan Crawford, who teaches Internet law at the University of Michigan. “The regulatory void here is substantial.”

In a previous clash over texting, Verizon Wireless in 2007 rejected a request for a text message program for Naral Pro-Choice America saying it had the right to block “controversial or unsavory” messages. Once the decision came under scrutiny, Verizon allowed the text program to go forward, calling the initial decision “an incorrect interpretation of a dusty internal policy,” but it did not disavow its legal power to reject messages.

The Naral dispute led a coalition of groups that focus on technology policy to file a request with the F.C.C. that asked for the government to step in and clarify the regulatory confusion surrounding text messages. The F.C.C. has announced no action on that filing.

Catholic Relief Services says it has not received a clear explanation for the decision to shut down the program, which used a five-digit number known as a short code to set up the call with potential donors.

Sprint has said it was all a big misunderstanding. “We never told them to shut the code down,” said Crystal N. Davis, a Sprint spokeswoman. “We have no problem with Catholic Relief Services.”

However, she said, Sprint needs proof, provided through the intermediary companies that market the short code services, that any charity pursuing such a plan is legitimate. The form that came back to Sprint “was incomplete,” she said.

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Laura Durington of Catholic Relief Services said her group was “so floored” when its program was rejected by Sprint. Credit...Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times

Mr. Alpert said that he had never been asked to vet a charity in three years of operation. Once he completed the requested form, he said he received no guidance or feedback about it.

The telecommunications giants generally do not deal directly with nonprofits, but distribute the short codes through intermediary companies known as aggregators, who often sell them to other companies that set up the text messaging services. So Catholic Relief Services heard from Mobile Commons, which got the bad news from an aggregator, OpenMarket.

The note from OpenMarket read, “We did everything we could over the last two days to save this program, but Sprint has officially rejected.” An OpenMarket spokesman, Scott Baldwin, said the company was simply the middleman, adding, “I’m not sure why Sprint rejected it.”

Laura Durington, the online communications manager for Catholic Relief Services, said that when the group found out its program had been rejected, “we were so floored.”

Ms. Davis, the Sprint spokeswoman, said the company was “working to resolve this situation” and had “no current plan to deny the use of the short code.”

Mr. Alpert said that on Tuesday, Sprint told him it would allow the program to continue if it were converted to a simple text-to-donate program.

The public interest groups that took part in the Naral filing in 2007 say that whatever the intricacies of the fight over Catholic Relief Services, the underlying issue is still the need for some regulatory authority and recourse in disputes.

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.

Matthew Nodine, a spokesman for the F.C.C., said that the agency had no comment on the Catholic Relief Services dispute, because of the 2007 petition. “It is a matter pending before the commission at this time,” he said.

Some experts question whether greater government authority is the answer. Adam D. Thierer, the president of the Progress and Freedom Foundation in Washington, a pro-business research organization, said that “most people would say, I want my carrier to be doing a certain amount of policing for potentially harmful or fraudulent activities,” and would hold the carrier responsible if things went wrong.

If a company has gone too far in that regard, he said, “I would hope to see that play out in the market and see what works and what doesn’t.”

Mr. Alpert disagreed. “Land’s End doesn’t have to live with the idea that Verizon isn’t going to let them be connected by voice,” he said. “How text messaging got into a different category makes no sense.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: For Charity vs. Sprint, a Tangle Over Text Messages. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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