Aawaara

31 10 / 2011

The unanswered email…[An open letter to TRAI]

Below is an email which I wrote just before the not so good (bordering foolish) TRAI regulations came into effect. The email still remains unanswered, in fact none of the people involved ever acknowledged the email or the problem itself. So I am posting it as an open letter to TRAI.

Mail Sent to:

TRAI
A minister related to industries who is young and tech savvy enough to leave his email address on the ministry site
A few people in NASSCOM
A few people in TIE

Date: Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 10:13 PM

Subject: The ‘Telecom Commercial Communications Regulations’ are a blow to entrepreneurs and the ecosystem.

Dear Sir,

First things first - I too have been a victim of pesky calls and SMSes quite too often and totally agree that something needs to be done about that, but stopping all communication cannot be the solution. You need to distinguish between good communication and bad communication and treating everything the same will create problems for everyone, especially for young entrepreneurs. We already face a lot of problems everyday and this is a serious blow to the fragile ecosystem available to entrepreneurs in India.

The obvious fault that is visible in the regulations that come into effect from 27th Sep, 2011 is that there is no scope for opt in services (pull based sms services). I recently launched my website that has a component that let’s a user set reminders. The user is completely responsible for what messages he/she gets and we don’t send any unsolicited messages. When the TRAI regulations come into effect, I will be punished for a crime that I didn’t commit.

Here are some of the problems that I think a lot of entrepreneurs in the web domain will be experiencing due to the new guidelines:

1) No SMS communication between 9PM-9AM. Web based services generally verify phone numbers by sending an activation code via SMS to abstain from sending spam. If the user registers in this time window, we cannot send them verification messages. We may send them the message next day, but that hampers the user experience badly. So this is a case when the user wants the message immediately but cannot get it due to the regulations. We are disrupting the normal flow of communication here.

2) The transactional category is fixed and everything else is classified as promotional. We also send messages which are transactional in nature. There may be cases where the user has subscribed and paid for those messages.

3) A subscriber cannot opt in for just one website/service. He/She needs to opt for a category (from the 7 predefined categories), and that effectively means that you are now open to all the messages from anyone who belongs to that category. That effectively translates to opening of floodgates for SPAM messages (of that category).

4) The identifier will now we a number (unique id) instead of the short code (DM-SERVICE). That means the user does not know from whom the message is coming. Previously a user could delete spam messages without actually reading it, by just looking at the short code. Now one will have to go through all the messages to filter out useful messages from the useless ones.

Let’s take a hypothetical situation where there is a service for which users pay to get reminders at anytime of the day. You have effectively shut them down due to the regulations. It may not be common in India but is quite common in the US:

http://checkappointments.com/

http://www.wakeupland.com/

http://www.ideophone.in/products/pyka/ (an Indian service)

The regulations completely take away an area to innovate from young entrepreneurs, which I don’t think is fair enough. The counter argument may be that if a user wants such services then he/she can unsubscribe from NCPR, but that is something like inviting spam and the user will not do so. The regulations seem to be squeezing our user base and restricting out thought process. For a normal subscriber it’s a case of - either you get everything or you get nothing, you don’t have the power to choose.

I request you to identify the problems in the current regulations and make scope for opt in services. You can put forward guidelines so that the users are not cheated into subscribing to websites, and in case of disputes you can put the onus of providing auditable information on the websites.

Hoping for a positive response.

Regards,

Amit Saxena

Tags:

Permalink

Comments