Whitelisting of commercial message content causes no major disruption on day 1

The telecom regulator’s mandate to whitelist content in commercial messages came into effect on Tuesday without causing any major disruption even as the traffic fell 15-20%, officials tracking the development said.

“No major issue was reported from anyone, including banks, etc. The 15-20% drop in traffic was expected because not all the entities have all their URLs whitelisted,” an official told ET, asking not to be named. “Things are going all right as of now.”

Whitelisting means entities sending commercial messages must provide all information related to URLs, OTT links and APKs (Android application packages or call back numbers) to telcos, who will then feed the information to their blockchain-based distributed ledger technology platform. If the information matches, the message is passed; otherwise, it is blocked.

Many entities might not have pushed their messages if the URLs were not whitelisted because such messages would have been blocked by the telecom operators, a second official said.

“The entities are in the process of whitelisting and in the coming days, things will streamline,” the person added.

To avoid any disruption, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has clarified that entities need not whitelist the dynamic portion of URLs and only the static portion has to be verified.

The telcos have also tuned their blockchain-based distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform in a way that it can read the static portion of the URL, which has been whitelisted and allow the message to pass through.


As per the Trai mandate, starting October 1, any commercial message containing URLs, OTT links and APKs should be whitelisted before sending to consumers. If such messages are not verified, they will be blocked by the telecom operators.

The regulator and telecom operators took steps to avoid any disruption in delivery of messages after the deadline of whitelisting was extended by one month to October 1 from September 1.

Mobile consumers had faced a wide scale outage in March 2021 when the DLT platform was implemented, and telcos started scrubbing messages. At the time, there was widespread disruption as telcos blocked all commercial messages that did not contain whitelisted headers and templates. All entities have since registered their headers and templates with telcos.

Apart from the whitelisting of messages, Trai had also mandated telecom operators to migrate telemarketing calls starting with 140 series to the blockchain-based distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform by September 30 so that there is better monitoring and control.

Further, to enhance message traceability, the regulator has mandated that the trail of all messages from senders to recipients must be traceable from November 1, 2024. “Any message with an undefined or mismatched telemarketer chain will be rejected,” Trai had said in its directions issued in August.

The directive by Trai was to ensure that all commercial messages are vetted before reaching the consumer as part of a wider effort aimed at combating rampant spam and fraud being perpetrated through messaging, or phishing.

In India, 1.5-1.7 billion commercial messages are sent every day, taking the total to about 55 billion every month, according to industry data.

As per the mandate of Trai, only the registered principal entities can send promotional and marketing messages to mobile consumers.

Telcos were also asked to move all commercial messaging (one-time passwords, promotional messages, account balance updates, etc) to the blockchain-based DLT platform.