Indiamart, the seller-focused online marketplace, is challenging TRAI’s SMS guidelines in the Delhi High Court, saying that they fail to make a distinction between commercial and non-commercial recipients of text messages, Mint reported. We have reached out to Indiamart for comment. The guidelines prevent them from sending B2B messages, the marketplace argued, saying that treating unlike categories of entities similarly violated the constitution.
Indiamart’s argument is essentially that since the people it sends texts to are retailers and not regular customers in whose interest it is to stop receiving commercial messages, they need to have a carve-out in the law. It’s not clear if Indiamart participated in the consultation process that led to the regulation that they are now seeking to get amended — there is no written submission from the company on TRAI’s website.
The anti-spam regulations have given the government a fair deal of trouble already. The regulations, which go so far to try and combat spam that they require SMS formats to be registered in a blockchain registry, majorly disrupted tens of millions of SMS messages, leading the regulator to pause its spam filters for one week.
Also read
