Trai pushes MeitY to act strongly to curb spam, phishing on OTT apps
MeitY) to take strong steps to check rampant instances of spam and phishing communications that are rapidly shifting to over-the-top (OTT) apps, such as WhatsApp and Telegram.
The OTT apps currently fall under MeitY's mandate in terms of regulatory compliance — not under The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) and the telecom department. The latter have been taking several steps to check the menace of pesky calls and messages which are used to perpetrate financial fraud as well.
In a recent meeting of the joint committee of regulators, officials of Trai asked Meity officials to take steps to control the menace being now perpetrated also through the communication apps.
Trai believes that there should be joint effort to tackle the problem of spam communications, say officials. After the mandate of Trai, the telecom operators have implemented a blockchain-based distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform to manage commercial traffic in a bid to curb such messages, but OTT communications are not covered under it.
The regulator a few weeks ago also directed telcos to stop transmitting messages containing URLs, OTT links, APKs (Android application packages) or call-back numbers that are not whitelisted — or registered with telcos — by senders from October 1.
Whitelisting means entities such as banks and ecommerce companies sending commercial messages must provide all information related to URLs, call-back numbers, etc., to telcos, who will then feed the information to their DLT platform. If the information
