New Delhi: The Telecom Regulatory of India (TRAI) on Friday directed all telecom service providers to stop the misuse of “message templates” for commercial communications, and give a compliance report in 45 days.
“Unsolicited Commercial Communication (UCC) is a major source of inconvenience to the public and impinges on the privacy of individuals and TRAI has been taking various steps to curb it,” the telecom regulator said in a statement.
It added it has issued a direction to service providers to stop misuse of message templates under the Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulations, 2018 (TCCCPR-2018).
The regulation – TCCCPR, 2018 — came into effect in February 2019, to deal with the menace of spam calls and messages. It established a framework to control UCC by mandating registration of all commercial promoters and telemarketers on a blockchain-based Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) platform. The regulations also required obtaining customer consent for receiving promotional messages at specific times and days chosen by them.
The direction by TRAI comes amid an increasing amount of user complaints over the increase in spam calls and messages.
TRAI has told all service providers that the use of more than three variable parts in the contents would be permitted only with proper justification and additional checks.
A variable part of a commercial message is that part of content which may vary across commercial communications sent to different recipients for same or similar subject, for example date format, numeric format, name of recipient, amount with currency; reference number and transaction identity.
“TRAI has mandated that Access Providers shall have to designate a separate approving authority for such content templates. Each variable part needs to be pre-tagged for the purpose it is proposed to be used and minimum thirty percentage of message should comprise of fixed part so that intent of the original message, for which the content template was approved, is not changed by the intermediaries,” it said.
It has also decided that only whitelisted URLs/links/call-back numbers will be allowed in the content template.
“All the Telecom Service Providers have been directed to furnish compliance report of the above direction within forty-five days,” it added.