Airtel to Trai: Regulate OTTs to control spam

New framework for OTT to help improve accountability

- JATIN GROVER

BHARTI AIRTEL VICE-CHAIRMAN and MD Gopal Vittal has urged the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) to expand its regulatory oversight to over-the-top (OTT) communication platforms in order to significantly curb spam.

In a recent letter to Trai secretary Atul Kumar Chaudhary, Vittal has recommended three immediate steps to Trai to address the issue of spam over OTT. First involves extending the digital consent acquisition (DCA) framework to OTT platforms. Second, mandating KYC framework for OTTs, and third is expanding the centralised blacklist system for spam detection to OTT platforms.

"While regulatory efforts have significantly curbed spam and unsolicited commercial communication (UCC) over SMS and voice, bad actors are increasingly shifting their operations to OTT communication platforms, where regulatory oversight remains limited," Vittal said in the letter.