TRAI's New Anti-Spam Move To Cause SMS Outage For Mobile Users In September: Report

Starting September 1, 2024, mobile users in India might experience interruptions in receiving service-related and transactional messages from their banks, financial institutions, and e-commerce firms.

The scale of this change is significant, considering that India sees approximately 1.5 billion-1.7 billion commercial messages sent daily, totaling around 55 billion messages per month.

Source : TRAI/X

Starting September 1, 2024, mobile users in India might experience interruptions in receiving service-related and transactional messages from their banks, financial institutions, and e-commerce companies. This potential disruption stems from a recent initiative by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) aimed at combating spam messages, with a particular focus on reducing phishing attempts, says a report by Economic Times (ET).

TRAI's Directive To Telecom Operators

TRAI has issued a directive to telecom operators (telcos) instructing them to cease the transmission of messages containing URLs or callback numbers that haven't been whitelisted or registered with them. This mandate requires banks, financial institutions, and online platforms to register their message templates and content with operators by August 31, 2024. Failure to comply will result in the blocking of messages containing these elements.

Currently, entities only register their headers and templates with telcos, not the actual content of the messages. This means that operators don't scrutinise or "scrub" the content of transmitted messages. However, beginning next month, telcos will need to implement a mechanism capable of reading the content of commercial messages and blocking those that don't match their records.

The scale of this change is significant, considering that India sees approximately 1.5 billion-1.7 billion commercial messages sent daily, totaling around 55 billion messages per month, according to industry data.

Telecom industry executives have requested additional time from TRAI to implement this mandate, as it requires updating the blockchain-based distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform. However, TRAI officials familiar with the matter indicate that the regulator believes sufficient time has been given and is unwilling to extend the deadline.

Major telecom providers such as Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio, and Vodafone Idea have not yet commented on the situation, the ET report added.

The whitelisting process requires entities sending messages to provide comprehensive information related to URL links, callback numbers, and headers. This regulation doesn't extend to over-the-top (OTT) platforms like WhatsApp and Google's rich communication services (RCS) messaging, as TRAI doesn't have a mandate to govern them. However, banking messages, which are not permitted to be transmitted over OTT platforms due to existing regulations, will be blocked if the sending entities have not been whitelisted.

TRAI has been urging telcos to implement these measures for over a year. The limited compliance thus far has prompted the regulator to take a firm stance, demanding that telcos halt the transmission of non-whitelisted messages from September 1, 2024.

In May 2023, TRAI issued directions asking telcos to ensure that only whitelisted URLs, APKs, OTT links, and callback numbers were present in content templates. The regulator requested a compliance report within 45 days and emphasized the need for traceability of messages from senders to recipients. However, telcos have not fully implemented these directions to date, leading to TRAI's current stringent approach.

This new regulation represents a significant shift in how commercial messages are handled in India, potentially affecting millions of mobile users and numerous businesses across the banking and e-commerce sectors.