The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has issued a list of directions to access service providers to stop the misuse of message templates, under the Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulations, 2018 (TCCCPR,2018, allows the authority to regulate unsolicited commercial communications). Under the new direction, access service providers have to designate an authority to approve commercial message templates. They also announced that only whitelisted URLs/Apks/OTT links/callback numbers will be allowed in commercial messages. Access service providers have 15 days to update their code of practice according to these directions and 45 days to get back to the authority with a compliance report. These directions are a follow-up to the directives previously issued by the authority in February this year. Why it matters: This is yet another step by TRAI to curb spam and phishing attacks. But based on what we have learned from the authority’s previous steps, spammers are always one step ahead of TRAI’s regulations. Previously, TRAI created a do-not-disturb (DND) list but without much success. But according to a LocalCircles survey, 92% of the 15,040 respondents continued to receive spam calls even after opting for DND. Post this, the authority enforced regulations mandating the use of AI spam filters in SMS and incoming call services. With message filters, we have found that only just spelling the words slightly differently than (writing TikTok as “Tikt0k”) is enough to overcome message filters. All of this leaves one wondering whether this attempt towards spam regulation would yield different results. Important…
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