Spam back in the can

Over the years, the government adopted various measures to curb unsolicited communication. This includes setting up a national do-not-call registry that was supposed to grant anyone who signed up a reprieve from pesky calls from telemarketers. The TRAI claims that it has issued notices to and disconnected over one lakh unregistered telemarketers in the past year. Yet, despite these impressive results, to the ordinary user, there seems to have been little to no improvement in the volume of unsolicited SMSs that she receives.

This seems to have less to do with the effectiveness of our enforcement and more to do with the innovativeness of telemarketers, who either moved their SMS-based marketing campaigns outside the country, where they were beyond the jurisdiction of Indian regulations or entered into silent collusion with telecom companies (particularly at the lower levels of their hierarchy) to continue to carry out their business despite the do-not-call restrictions.

The TRAI's recent order restricts users from sending more than 100 SMSs per day per SIM card at concessional rates. All SMSs beyond this number must be charged at no less than 50 paise per local SMS — a significant increase from current costs, which can be as low as 1 or 2 paise per SMS. The TRAI has also directed telecom operators to put in place technical solutions within three months, which will check to see whether multiple commercial SMSs are being sent from the same source number with the same or similar characters. Once that is in place, the TRAI will prohibit sending more than 200 SMSs with a similar "signature", character or string in an hour.

These rules have been met with mixed reactions. Now that SMS has become such a widely prevalent mode of communication, there is some concern that innocent subscribers will also get caught up in the net cast to snare commercial telemarketers. At the same time, there is a concern that even with these stringent measures it will be impossible to break the nexus between the unregistered telemarketers and the distribution and marketing channels of the Indian telecom companies.

... contd.

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