What are TCCCPR regulations?
Back in 2018, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) overhauled the primitive anti-spam regulations and introduced the Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulation (TCCCPR) 2018. It introduced a novel distributed ledger technology (DLT) framework for sending commercial messages. All banks, financial institutions, e-commerce companies, government agencies, marketers and other companies sending commercial SMS were required to register their entities, headers (e.g. AK-SBIBNK) and message contents on the blockchain developed and operated by the telecom companies. The network operators were then required to verify each of these elements before delivering an SMS to the recipient. This mechanism is called scrubbing.What were the reactions?
Industry players put up strong resistance. Telecom companies said the regulatory burden would destroy SMS as a communication channel. Then there were half a dozen lawsuits filed against Trai by companies like Paytm, IndiaMart, etc., but none of them held up in court. Telecom companies finally started pursuing the project in 2020, but implementation was delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
What were the effects?
In the short term, the blockchain registration system was able to weed out unregistered spammers. The number of headers used to send SMS was reduced by a third from about 900,000 in 2018 to about 600,000 in 2022. Headers used by spammers similar to those used by SBI, Uber, Amazon, etc. were removed. However, the scale of the implementation was so large that many companies did not get it right. This resulted in 50% of messages dropping on March 8, 2021, when telecom companies started filtering their content templates. OTPs from banks, railways, Aadhaar authentication and even Co-Win registrations required for Covid vaccinations were disrupted then.
What is the current status?
These were implementation issues that took 3-7 days at each stage of deployment. But Trai has since expanded the scope of TCCCPR regulations to combat the evolving tactics used by spammers to defeat the system. It was found that miscreants were now inserting phishing URLs, OTT links, APKs or callback numbers into whitelists or templates registered with telcos that would bypass the systems. Hence, Trai went a step further and asked telcos to whitelist the genuine links as well. Separately, the regulator has mandated telcos to develop AI/ML-based anti-phishing techniques.What remains to be done?
Six years after the regulations were announced, their implementation is still not complete. The consent module, which gave subscribers the choice and was the most important aspect of spam control, has not yet been implemented. The implementation of voice channels has also taken a different direction, as the Telecommunications Department has introduced new numbering series for advertising calls. When it comes to spam and fraud, every mobile subscriber is a witness in their own right!
