Along with Olacabs CEO Bhavish Aggarwal, Gupshup co-founder & CEO Beerud Sheth also spoke about his experience in dealing with regulators in the extremely dynamic telecom segment and the difference in the intent and the actual execution of policies, at a session moderated by Manish Sabharwal, co-founder and chairman, TeamLease Services, in the recently concluded Nasscom Product Conclave 2013. Sheth said the regulator issues they face are acts of both omission and commission of new policies. "Sometimes the regulators doesn't fully understand the issues or in certain cases, they understand the issues and have good intentions but are misguided in their implementation, confusing the cause and the effect and not realizing the implications." "For instance, they raised the prices of messages to curb spam. While spam prevention is a good policy, raising prices is always a bad idea in the ecosystem". He also cited the example of email where there are better ways of solving spam through spam filters rather than charging a rate to reduce spam. On Transactional & Promotional Messages On the flip side, Sheth said the regulator sometimes introduces policies but there is no enforcement around it. "For example, they created a separation between transactional messages which are the good messages and promotional messages which are bad messages but who defines these, where do you draw the line, how do you draw the line, and who enforces this policy if somebody sends bad messages through good channels". He pointed out that initially there was no one who was responsible for enforcing this policy since…
