On Friday the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) ordered telcos to curb the ‘menace’ of unsolicited spam calls and messages by developing a common platform to record if consumers have consented to receive telemarketing communications, and which organizations they have consented to receive them from. Telcos have been given until July 31 to develop and deploy the system, which is being described as a Digital Consent Acquisition platform. Having a national system of this nature will complement existing rules that require telcos to block unregistered telemarketing traffic. The system will utilize Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to ensure everybody has consistent visibility of the consents given by each individual phone user.
During the first phase of adoption, which will last the duration of August, only consumers will be able to instigate a change to the consent they have given. Organizations that engage in telemarketing will be allowed to message consumers to ask them for permission for further telemarketing from the beginning of September, and all such messages will have to use short code 127xxx. If a consumer rejects or ignores a message from an entity asking for consent to telemarketing communications then the entity will have to wait at least 90 days before requesting consent again. Contact information like URLs and phone numbers will only be permitted in these messages if they have already been included in a national allowlist. Consumers will be able to opt out of receiving any telemarketing permission-seeking messages by informing their telco via SMS, voice or the web.
As a Brit, I am often depressed that the UK’s lazy comms regulator often looks to salesmen from the USA for advice on how to protect customers from unwanted calls and messages, instead of paying attention to the work being done by regulators in Commonwealth countries like India and Australia. Trying to end spam by being more like the USA is like trying to end war by being more like Vladimir Putin. It is clear why so many big businesses prefer vastly complicated and expensive alternatives to the methods being adopted in India; empowering the consumer might lead to a significant reduction in all forms of telemarketing, and that is not an outcome wanted by big businesses or their enablers in the comms industry. Their stooges in various regulators will continue to make excuses about their being ‘no silver bullets’, whilst selectively comparing themselves to other countries that also maintain an elitist attitude designed to frustrate phone users who want more control over the communications they receive. They do not want consumers to know countries like India are giving ordinary people the right to stop receiving any telemarketing call or message, as supported by unambiguous records of the consent that each individual has given.
Technologists like the phrase ‘no silver bullet’ because it emphasizes the limits of technology, but it also reveals a limited imagination and a limited worldview. If India can implement a unified platform to record the existence or absence of consent to telemarketing calls and messages for over one billion people then every other country can protect their populations in exactly the same way.
The TRAI direction that orders the implementation of Digital Consent Acquisition can be found here, and the associated press release is here.
