Telecom operators and the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) have argued that stringent telecom regulations have pushed nearly 80 per cent of spam calls and messages onto unregulated over-the-top (OTT) communication platforms and internet messaging applications, urging the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to bring such platforms under its regulatory framework.
Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea Limited stated that while telecom networks operate under strict regulations, including know your customer (KYC) requirements, header registrations and artificial intelligence (AI)-based spam filtering systems, OTT platforms face lighter oversight. According to the operators, this allows fraudsters to bypass measures introduced by TRAI to curb spam communications.
Representatives of OTT platforms, however, pointed out that while drafting the Telecommunications Act, 2023, the government had deliberately chosen to place the regulation of OTT infrastructure under the Ministry of electronics and information technology rather than telecom regulators.
The Broadband India Forum (BIF) further argued that supreme court rulings have established that delegated legislation cannot exceed the scope of its parent law, making TRAI’s attempts to regulate internet-based applications legally debatable.
The views were presented during an open-house discussion organised by TRAI on proposed amendments to the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations.
The draft regulations propose the use of AI to identify and block spam calls. While telecom operators broadly supported the proposal, they cautioned that current AI models are not yet capable of consistently delivering the high-confidence thresholds required for accurate spam detection. They also warned that integrating AI-based spam flagging with complaint management systems could place additional pressure on the distributed ledger technology (DLT) framework currently used by TRAI to track spam communications.
OTT platforms did not explicitly support the proposal and instead objected to TRAI’s attempts to regulate their independent spam-filtering mechanisms.
