Indian Authority Caps Spam SMSes, Challenged in Court

by Ahmed Rayyan

Pakistan telecom authority is not alone to carry out measure for curbing spam SMS but the same situation happened in India as its telecom authority has recently taken action to contain spamming through levy restriction of 200 SMSes per day per SIM.

The action was taken because of the rising complaints of the consumers for receiving spam SMS on daily basis likewise in Pakistan a significant number of consumers have been sick for tens of marketing and promotional SMS in their inbox.

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) action however have been challenged in the court a day after announcement.

The Delhi High Court issued notices to the telecom authority and the central government questioning cap of 200 SMSes per day per SIM. The petition also alleged that the checks and measures under the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, 2010, were already enough to tackle the menace of unsolicited SMS’s and the SMS cap has been imposed in a non-transparent manner without any prior consultation with the stakeholders.

The SMS spam regulations finally saw the light of the day on September 27, 2011, following which the regulator capped the outgoing SMS at 100 SMS’s per day per SIM, which was subsequently extended to allow 200 SMS per day per SIM and an additional charge of 5 paise was levied on promotional SMS.

The regulator’s decision to limit the number of peer to peer SMS was not required because it is useless to limit spam when spammers have discovered other alternatives including using servers and numbers located outside Indiafor the same purpose. It only ended up affecting the end-consumer who uses SMS as a means of communication, an Indian blog, MediaNama commented.

Also, other counter measures such as limiting bulk SMS special tariffs were sufficient to discourage non-registered spammers.

The problem is as much with the SMS limit, which effectively limits individual communication – for example, can you imagine a limit on the number of calls you make in a day – as it is with the arbitrariness with which the policy was changed and then rolled back, it added.