ET Explains: Using blockchain to check spam is a work in progress
The telecom regulator's ambitious project to deploy blockchain for a first-of-its-kind use case of checking spam through telecom channels-SMS and voice-has had multiple setbacks since its deployment started in 2020. Price wars among telecom companies, a lack of seriousness among enterprise senders of commercial messages, and evolving tactics among spammers are helping spam continue largely unabated while blocking some genuine messages to customers. Back in March 2021, nearly 50%, or 370 million, commercial messages, including OTPs, failed to deliver when the template filtering system was first implemented. Another such disruption-albeit not of that scale-is expected to occur from September 1 when weblinks filtering will go live. ET explains the regulations and their impact over the years.
What are TCCCPR Regulations?
Back in 2018, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) overhauled the primitive anti-spam regulations to bring in 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, ecommerce companies, government departments, marketers and other entities sending commercial SMS were required to register their entities, headers (eg, AK-SBIBNK) and message content on the blockchain developed and operated by telcos.
The carriers were then required to verify each of these elements before an SMS was delivered to the recipient. This mechanism is called scrubbing.
