Delhi High Court denies plea to quash new SMS norms

Delhi High Court denies plea to quash new SMS norms

E-commerce company Indiamart failed to get interim relief on its plea seeking scrapping of the new SMS regulations intended to check spam messages

The Delhi High Court (HC) denied interim relief to e-commerce company Indiamart Intermesh Ltd over a Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) regulation to check spam messages and protect customers from online frauds.

TRAI had issued the Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR), 2018 in July 2018 to effectively deal with the nuisance of spam.

TCCCPR prohibit unregistered senders from initiating commercial messages, while registered companies are prevented from sending fraudulent messages to customers.

Indiamart, which provides online listing services to businesses across India, had challenged the TRAI rule in a writ petition and contended that the TRAI rule was unconstitutional.

The e-commerce company had sought a direction to the TRAI from the HC to amend the definition of customers in TCCCPR, distinguishing between commercial and non-commercial subscribers.

Indiamart further said that was facing issues in sending SMSes to its B2B customers due to the inability of the telcos to identify the commercial and non-commercials recipients that had resulted in a blanket ban by the telcos.

"It is submitted that the respondent (TRAI) by delegating adjudicatory powers to the access providers (telcos) and by not making reasonable classification and not acting on petitioner's (Indiamart) representation is acting arbitrarily and abusing its power and this court must not allow the same," Indiamart said in its petition.

The TRAI rules have put the onus on the telcos to verify the content of every SMS with the registered text before delivering it to consumers. For this, telcos have adopted blockchain-based technology that checks headers, or sender IDs, and content of every SMS originating from a registered source, while unregistered sources are rejected. All transactional and promotional messages are now supposed to follow a standard template with header, preference and consent, which should be registered with the telecom operators.

The HC has issued a notice to the TRAI after taking cognizance of the plea and has adjourned the matter till 30 April 2021.