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TRAI releases Consultation Paper on Regulatory Mechanism for Over-The-Top (OTT) Communication Services, and Selective Banning of OTT Services.

Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has requested TRAI to suggest a suitable regulatory mechanism for OTTs, including issues relating to 'selective banning of O1T services' as part of its recommendations to DoT.

Further, a parliamentary panel has recommended the DoT to examine the recommendation of TRAI and come out with a policy which will enable the selective banning of OTT services such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram during unrest and crisis as these apps are prone to be used by terrorists or anti-national elements in specified regions.

In December 2021, a Parliaments Standing Committee on Communication and Information Technology submitted its 26th report titled Suspension of telecom services/ Internet and its impact.

The Committee feels that it will be of great relief if the DoT can explore the option of banning selective services, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram etc. instead of banning the Internet as a whole. This will allow financial services, health, education, and various other services to continue to operate for business as usual thereby minimizing inconvenience and suffering to the general public and also help in controlling spreading of misinformation during unrest.

Through the letter dated 7th September 2022, DoT has also mentioned that "in view of the humongous growth of services in the recent past and these services having reached a matured stage, there is a need to holistically look into the various aspects of these services induding regulatory, economic, security, privacy, and safety aspects. This is also in keeping with para 2.2 of the National Digital Communications Policy - 2018 which mentions the policy goal for "Ensuring a holitic and harmonal approach for harnessing Emerging Technologies' It has been mentioned therein that a policy framework for 'Over the Top' services will be developed."

The consultation paper mentions "In some use cases such as messaging, consumer preferences have switched from traditional telecommunication services to OTTs. With OTTs used increasingly for messaging and to some extent for voice communication, globally, the general trend is a transition from voice and SMS towards data as a primary source of revenue for telecom service providers. In India, composition of the revenue basket of wireless access service providers has undergone a sea-change in the period from the year 2013 to 2022.

The websites that use dynamic IP addresses and are hosted on cloud servers can pose a challenge to conventional methods of blocking said the consultation paper. In such situations, such situations, alternative methods may be necessary to effectively control internet filtering. Advanced techniques can be employed to identify and block access to such websites.

Further, there may be scenarios where the targeted websites use Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (https) protocol. HTTPS protocol provides encryption and security for websites, making it difficult for service providers to block content on these sites. However, there are still ways to block or filter content at a network level, such as using a firewall or content filtering software. As far as area specific barring is concerned, it also needs to be carried out at network level, for which effective methods are required to be worked out.

The Department have also informed the parliamentary committee that Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram etc. are basically categorized as OTT services in short. These OTT services are riding over the existing telecom service provider's network.

In the consultation paper, the regulator has sought views on the requirement of a framework for OTTs encompassing lawful interception, privacy and security, customer verification, pesky calls and messages, technical challenges in banning specific service etc.

In the past several consultation papers, TRAI has set aside the demand for regulating internet-based calling and messaging apps.

TRAI has set August 4 as the last date for comments on the paper and August 18 for counter comments.

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TRAI Exploring Emergency Ban on WhatsApp and Facebook - IndianWeb2.com