The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has yet to activate the consent system mandated under the 2018 Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR), according to a discussion held on August 12 in New Delhi. The consent system, designed to record what commercial messages users agree to receive, remains the missing piece in the spam prevention framework, as reported by medianama.com.
The TCCCPR regulations established a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) platform, a blockchain-based system to register commercial senders and trace messages. However, the consent layer, which should sit at the core of this platform, was never operationalised. Without this consent mechanism, the system cannot verify if a message matches a user’s agreement, resulting in reliance on guesswork to identify spam. Participants at the roundtable noted that users currently have no way to view or confirm what they have consented to receive.
This gap in implementation means spam identification depends solely on recipients’ definitions, as there is no centralized record of consent. The absence of the consent layer undermines the effectiveness of the DLT platform and the broader spam prevention efforts under TRAI’s regulations. The issue highlights challenges in enforcing telecom rules designed to protect consumers from unwanted commercial communications.
The consent system’s activation would allow recipients to define spam by verifying messages against their recorded preferences. The roundtable discussion emphasized that once the consent layer is switched on, it will provide transparency and improve spam regulation enforcement under the TCCCPR framework.