[wtmt]

In India this has been the regulation for several years, and has helped along with the Do Not Disturb (DND) registration by the end user and rules for senders/callers. Anyone sending bulk SMSes, even if the sending is done through a third party provider like AWS from another country/region, will have to register. [1]

The entity, the header, content template (which allows two or three variables/placeholders) need to be registered. A Distributed Ledger (DLT) is used to store these. Ad hoc messages without a registered template are expected to be rejected by the telco.

[1]: https://trai.gov.in/advice-to-senders

[captn3m0]

And as we can see from Australia, this doesn’t need a blockchain.

[chrismorgan]

As an Australian who moved to India a couple of years ago: I’ve found India’s Do Not Call Register significantly less effective than Australia’s, because telco, ISP, TRAI and other government offices keep on sending spam, a lot of it stuff that will train people to be phished, and if you report them as DND violations, they declare them service-related. And for telco/ISP, they commingle with actual service-related and important transactional messages, so you can’t just block the shortcodes.

In Australia, I don’t remember ever really getting spam SMSes. Emails from the bank, yes, but that’s easier to filter if desired. When you get the same old spam messages time after time, you can filter them in email, but text message apps are often not up to that sort of thing.

The really stupid thing is that more than half of the spam is about blocking spam. At least once a month, AD-TRAIND-G sends:

> స్పామర్లపై చర్య కోసం స్పామ్ను రిపోర్ట్ చెయ్యండి. అయితే, ఫోన్ కాలింగ్ యాప్లో స్పామర్ను బ్లాక్ చేయడం వల్ల స్పామర్పై చర్య తీసుకోబడదు. స్పామ్ను TRAI DND యాప్ లేదా సర్వీస్ ప్రొవైడర్ యాప్ లేదా 1909 లో రిపోర్ట్ చెయ్యండి. TRAI DND యాప్లో రిపోర్ట్ చేయడం సులభం మరియు వేగవంతం, ఈరోజే ఇన్స్టాల్ చేసుకోండి.

And AD-AIRDOT-S just sends a random message from a pool of half a dozen or so, mostly English but one or two Telugu, sometimes every few days, sometimes every few weeks. Such as:

> Alert: On receiving unwanted SMS , please complain by calling 1909 or send SMS to 1909 in format 'SMS Content, Sender No, dd/mm/yy' or visit bit.ly/2qBK0vp to report through Airtel Thanks App.

(Huh, that link is now broken. Used to work. Makes it even more dumb.)

I should automate reporting all of this stuff, deliberately to waste their time, and maybe, just maybe, make someone think, “maybe we should stop sending this stuff”.

There was also RCS… I turned that off after a bit, because it was being used purely for spam and undesirable stuff, and you couldn’t complain in the same channels. RCS is dead like this.