New SMS Regulations: TRAI Puts the Implementation on Hold for A Week

After TRAI imposed the new SMS regulations on Monday, the companies who use the service are still in a mess. Not just that, millions of people around the country are not receiving OTPs for online transactions. What's more, even Aadhar services have collapsed and work in underway to fix the same. However, TRAI has put the implementation of the same on hold for a week after much pressure from the industries across the board. Apparently, this move also comes so that these companies can have some time to restructure their SMS templates.

Why Did India Need New SMS Regulations?

Unsolicited SMSes are a big nuisance in the day to day lives of millions today. Everyone tends to receive tens of SMSes a day as soon as they sign up to some service or an app. Moreover, the risk of phishing attacks has increased multiple folds too. These attacks can be as simple as an SMS with a link and as soon as you click the link, you receive an OTP. As soon as you do, the attacker calls and asks for the same. If someone ends up telling the OTP, their account will be washed out of thousands, if not more. That is just one example.

To counter such issues, Honorable Delhi High Court directed TRAI to implement a blockchain-based solution called "content scrubbing". The way this method work is as follows:

• A telemarketer sends an SMS in bulk.
• Unregistered Users are blocked straightaway.
• TRAI's system matches the SMS's content with their templates.
• The messages that match with the template are allowed to go through and the rest are blocked.

This is the reason why there were a lot of issues regarding OTPs in particular. Many banks such as ICICI Bank, and other public and private banks, faced the issue. This resulted in people being stranded during payments, which could be crucial in nature for many. TRAI and the other telcos laid the blame of the problems faced by companies on their own selves as they noted there was enough time to implement these changes beforehand.

TRAI has now paused the implementation so that everyone who suffered can adjust the content of their SMSes to match the templates provided by them.

It will be interesting to see how differently things pan out when these regulations are implemented again.