TRAI's New Rules for OTT Messaging Apps in India: What the 2026 Draft Amendment Really Means for Businesses

Everything you need to know about TRAI's evolving stance on WhatsApp, RCS, Telegram, and other OTT communication platforms — and what it means for how your business sends SMS, WhatsApp, and RCS messages in India.

Introduction

For years, India's telecom regulator sat on the fence about Over-The-Top (OTT) communication apps. WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and similar platforms were treated as internet applications, not telecom services — which meant they largely sat outside the strict spam-control and licensing regime that governs SMS and voice calls. That's changing, and 2026 is shaping up to be the year the fence finally comes down on one side.

If your business sends bulk SMS, runs WhatsApp Business API campaigns, or is exploring Google RCS messaging in India, this shift matters directly to you — not because the rules for your own compliance are being rewritten from scratch, but because the entire commercial-communication ecosystem you operate in is being tightened, standardized, and increasingly enforced with technology TRAI didn't have five years ago.

This article breaks down exactly where TRAI's OTT regulation stands as of mid-2026, how we got here, what the draft Third Amendment to the TCCCPR actually proposes, why industry bodies are pushing back, and — most importantly — what businesses using SMS, WhatsApp, and RCS need to do to stay compliant while this plays out.

A Quick History: How We Got Here

To understand where TRAI is headed, it helps to understand where it started.

2018: The Original TCCCPR

The foundational regulation here is the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, 2018 (TCCCPR 2018), issued by TRAI to curb Unsolicited Commercial Communication (UCC) — the formal term for what most of us just call spam calls and spam SMS. It came into force in February 2019 and established the framework that Indian businesses still operate under today:

• Registration of telemarketers and businesses ("Principal Entities") on a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) platform

• Registration of sender headers (the 6-character codes businesses use as SMS sender IDs)

• Registration and approval of message content templates

• A Do Not Disturb (DND) preference system letting consumers opt out of promotional communication

• A distinction between transactional/service messages (always allowed) and promotional messages (restricted by consent and time windows)

TCCCPR 2018 was amended once in December 2018 for minor clarifications, and then left largely untouched for over six years while TRAI focused on getting DLT adoption right across telecom operators and businesses.

2018-2020: The First OTT Consultation, and a Deliberate Pause

Interestingly, TRAI actually opened the OTT regulation question back in November 2018, when it issued a consultation paper examining whether OTT communication services should be regulated similarly to traditional telecom services. The paper looked at questions like substitutability between OTT and telecom services, the "regulatory imbalance" between the two, lawful interception concerns, and interoperability.

After two years of consultation, open house discussions in Bangalore and Delhi, and considerable industry input, TRAI's conclusion in 2020 was notably restrained: it decided not to recommend a comprehensive regulatory framework for OTT services at that time, stating it wasn't "an opportune moment" to do so, and that market forces should be allowed to respond to the situation first. TRAI specifically noted that no other country had meaningfully regulated OTT communication apps yet, and suggested revisiting the question once more international clarity emerged — pointing to an ongoing ITU study as a reference point.

For years, that was effectively the end of it. WhatsApp, Telegram, and other messaging apps continued operating in India without a telecom-style licensing or spam-control regime, while SMS and voice calls remained tightly regulated under TCCCPR.

2024: The Pressure Builds Again

The conversation reopened in October 2024. At the India Mobile Congress, TRAI Chairman Anil Kumar Lahoti stated publicly that while OTT communication platforms had clearly benefited consumers and businesses, regulatory issues raised by law enforcement agencies and traditional telecom operators meant these platforms should now come under a "structured regulatory framework." He emphasized that regulators globally need to strike a balance between fostering innovation and maintaining a level, competitive marketplace — a notable acknowledgment of the cross-border, fast-moving nature of OTT platforms.

This wasn't a random shift. It followed weeks of pressure from the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) — the industry body representing telecom operators like Airtel, Jio, and Vodafone Idea — which had raised concerns that OTT messaging platforms were being excluded from a proposed new service authorization framework altogether. The core argument telecom operators have consistently made: SMS and voice calls are already subject to strict DLT-based spam controls, while OTT platforms handling comparable (or larger) volumes of user communication operate under much lighter obligations. That imbalance, operators argue, creates loopholes that spam actors and scammers increasingly exploit — routing fraud and unsolicited messaging through channels with less oversight.

Both the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and TRAI have acknowledged limited success in checking spam and online scams specifically on OTT platforms, which added weight to the operators' argument.

February 2025: The Second Amendment Tightens the Existing Regime

Before addressing OTT platforms directly, TRAI first moved to strengthen the existing TCCCPR framework for SMS and calls. On 12 February 2025, TRAI notified the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference (Second Amendment) Regulations, 2025, which the Ministry of Communications described as aiming to build a more transparent commercial communication ecosystem, reinforcing consumer rights while ensuring legitimate commercial communication continues through registered entities based on customer consent.

The Second Amendment made several concrete, practical changes that businesses sending bulk SMS are likely already feeling:

• Faster complaint processing: complaint-processing timelines were cut significantly

• Lower complaint threshold for action: the number of complaints needed to trigger enforcement action against a sender dropped from ten to five

• Shorter consent validity: explicit consent for commercial transactions was capped at just seven days of validity — meaning a customer's consent to receive a promotional message effectively expires quickly and must be refreshed

• Direct enforcement power: TRAI gained the ability to act directly against a sender or telemarketer, rather than always routing enforcement through the telecom operator first

• Standardized sender header categories: SMS headers now carry a clear category prefix so that operators (and their AI-based filters) can instantly classify traffic — P for promotional, S for service, T for transactional, and G for government

If your business has noticed shorter windows for customer consent to remain valid, or stricter header categorization requirements when registering templates on the DLT platform, this is why — it's a direct result of the February 2025 amendment, and it's already in force today.

The Draft Third Amendment (2026): What's Actually Being Proposed

This brings us to the current draft under active discussion: the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference (Third Amendment) Regulations, 2026.

TRAI released this as a consultation paper on 13 March 2026. It's important to be precise about the status here: this is a draft, not a finalized regulation. The consultation window for written comments and counter-comments closed in April 2026, and industry watchers currently expect a final rule sometime later this year — but as of now, nothing in the Third Amendment is legally binding yet.

That said, the draft signals clearly where TRAI intends to take commercial communication regulation next, and it's worth understanding in detail because it touches SMS, voice, and — for the first time in a binding regulatory instrument — OTT messaging platforms.

Why TRAI Says This Amendment Is Needed

TRAI's stated rationale is straightforward: based on stakeholder feedback and recent technological developments — particularly the rollout of AI-based UCC detection by major access providers — TRAI felt existing provisions needed updating, and some new provisions needed adding, to make the regulatory framework more effective and efficient. The draft also aligns TCCCPR's language and definitions with the newer Telecommunications Act, 2023, replacing older references to the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885.

Key Provision 1: Mandatory AI/ML-Based Spam Detection

The draft formally mandates that access providers (telecom operators) implement AI and machine-learning-based systems to detect and disrupt suspected spam senders. This isn't entirely new in practice — some operators had already begun deploying such systems following the Second Amendment — but the Third Amendment would make this a formal, mandatory requirement across the board.

For legitimate businesses, this cuts both ways. On one hand, better spam detection should mean fewer of your legitimate transactional and promotional messages get caught in aggressive blanket filtering by operators trying to control spam manually. On the other hand, it also means any anomalies in your sending patterns — sudden volume spikes, inconsistent header usage, high complaint rates — are more likely to get flagged automatically and faster than before.

Key Provision 2: A2P Voice Call Controls

The draft introduces specific controls around Application-to-Person (A2P) automated voice calls — the automated calls businesses use for things like OTP verification calls, appointment reminders, or automated notifications. Under the proposal, businesses would need to declare A2P automated voice call traffic in advance to avoid penalties. There's also discussion of a possible termination charge on A2P automated calls specifically designed to disincentivize bulk robo-dialing — Airtel, for instance, has proposed a charge of roughly ₹0.05 per call attempt in its formal response to the consultation.

This is directly relevant if your messaging stack includes automated voice OTP or IVR-based customer communication alongside SMS and WhatsApp — the compliance burden and potential cost structure for that channel specifically is set to change.

Key Provision 3: A Regulatory Sandbox

The draft proposes establishing a Regulatory Sandbox — a live, controlled testing environment where TRAI can trial new anti-spam technologies and regulatory approaches (such as AI/ML tools or additional DLT-based tracking mechanisms) before rolling them out network-wide. The goal is to validate new spam-detection methods without risking large-scale disruption to legitimate commercial traffic — a reasonable, industry-friendly approach if implemented well, since it suggests TRAI is trying to avoid the kind of blunt-instrument rule changes that have disrupted legitimate SMS delivery in the past.

Key Provision 4: Faster, More Structured Grievance Redressal

Consumer complaint handling gets streamlined further. If a spam complaint isn't resolved within 15 days, the new framework is expected to provide consumers a direct path to an Appellate Authority for final resolution — removing some of the back-and-forth that previously slowed down enforcement action.

Key Provision 5: Granular Consumer Consent Controls

Consumers are expected to gain more precise control over what commercial communication they receive — the ability to opt in or out by specific category (banking vs. real estate vs. e-commerce, for example), by mode (SMS vs. voice call), and even by specific time bands during the day. For businesses, this likely means DLT-registered consent and preference data will need to get more granular, and blanket promotional sends to a full customer list may become riskier if customers have selectively opted out of certain categories or time windows.

Key Provision 6: Definitional Alignment — Including "A2P-Based Communication"

The draft introduces a formal definition for A2P-based communication (Application-to-Person), something telecom operators like Airtel have specifically welcomed as restoring "regulatory clarity and integrity" around how enterprise-originated traffic enters telecom networks securely. Operators have also pushed back on proposed exemptions for certain entity categories (such as financial institutions), arguing that since these entities account for a significant share of commercial traffic and remain susceptible to misuse, differential treatment would violate the principle of a level playing field. Whether financial institutions and similar high-volume senders retain any special treatment in the final rule remains an open question.

The OTT Messaging Piece: Where This Gets Controversial

Here's the part most directly relevant to the "OTT regulation" conversation: the draft reportedly includes provisions requiring OTT communication platforms to share certain data with telecom access providers.

This is where industry pushback has been sharpest. The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) — representing internet and OTT platform interests — has formally characterized this as regulatory overreach, arguing that:

1. TRAI's draft attempts to regulate OTT platforms beyond what falls within its statutory telecommunications scope

2. Mandating that OTT platforms share proprietary data with access providers amounts to what IAMAI calls "unconstitutional expropriation of valuable proprietary data" — data that platforms have built through significant intellectual and financial investment

3. Compelling this kind of disclosure could undermine platforms' fundamental right to conduct trade or business

4. The proposal could also affect intermediaries' safe harbour protections — the legal shield that protects platforms from liability for user-generated content, provided they meet certain conditions under India's IT Act framework

This isn't the first time IAMAI has raised this specific objection. It previously argued that TRAI's earlier anti-spam draft regulations exceeded TRAI's statutory remit by attempting to regulate OTT platforms and invoke consequences tied to Section 79 of the IT Act (the core safe harbour provision for intermediaries in Indian law).

There's also a separate but related thread worth knowing about: TRAI has recently sought IT Act enforcement powers specifically to act against call-management and spam-filtering apps like Truecaller, proposing to bring such apps under its anti-spam framework through amendments. This has raised its own institutional questions — commentators have pointed out that if TRAI is granted these IT Act powers for a narrowly defined purpose (like acting on spam-tagging and numbering-series issues), it raises the question of what safeguards would prevent broader use of those powers in future disputes involving other kinds of intermediaries down the line.

Where Telecom Operators Stand

Unsurprisingly, telecom operators are largely supportive of extending obligations to OTT platforms. Their consistent argument, repeated across years of consultation, is about fairness: SMS and voice communication over telecom networks already face strict spam controls, DLT registration requirements, and content template approval — while OTT platforms carrying comparable volumes of commercial and personal communication operate with far lighter regulatory obligations. From the operators' perspective, this isn't just about competitive fairness; they argue the imbalance actively creates loopholes that bad actors exploit to run scams and unsolicited campaigns through less-regulated channels.

Why This Isn't (Yet) an "OTT Licensing" Framework

It's worth being precise about what's happening here versus what commentators sometimes describe more loosely. TRAI is not currently proposing to license OTT messaging apps the way telecom operators are licensed, and it hasn't reversed its earlier 2020 position that a comprehensive standalone OTT regulatory framework isn't yet warranted. What's actually happening is narrower but still significant:

• TRAI is regulating the spam and commercial-communication behavior that flows through and around OTT platforms — largely by tightening the existing TCCCPR framework and, in the current draft, extending certain data-sharing obligations to OTT platforms

• The broader question of licensing OTT platforms as telecom-equivalent services remains separate, and was in fact explicitly excluded from a related proposed service authorization framework — which is precisely what triggered COAI's original complaint back in 2024

In other words: think of this less as "TRAI is about to license WhatsApp like a telecom operator" and more as "TRAI is extending its anti-spam enforcement toolkit to reach into OTT platforms' data, without changing their fundamental regulatory status." That distinction matters, and it's also exactly the distinction IAMAI is fighting over — because even this narrower data-sharing obligation, they argue, exceeds TRAI's jurisdiction.

Enforcement Is Already Getting More Aggressive — Separate from the Draft Amendment

While the Third Amendment sits in draft form, TRAI's existing enforcement machinery has been ramping up visibly through 2025 and into 2026, which is worth businesses paying attention to regardless of how the OTT provisions land.

In February 2026, TRAI launched revamped versions of its TRAI DND and TRAI MySpeed mobile apps, rebuilt with simpler interfaces, multilingual support, and faster complaint registration and tracking. TRAI Chairman Lahoti described these as tools that let consumers directly assess service providers, report spam more effectively, and play a direct role in improving service quality — with a companion MyCall app for call-quality feedback that was expected to launch shortly after.

Alongside the app launch, TRAI released its annual enforcement update on Unsolicited Commercial Communication and DND compliance for 2025, and the numbers are significant: over 17 lakh (1.7 million) spam complaints were filed through the DND app in 2025 alone, contributing directly to enforcement action against unregistered telemarketers. That's a scale of consumer-driven enforcement pressure that simply didn't exist a few years ago, and it's only getting easier for consumers to generate with each app revamp.

For any business running SMS, WhatsApp, or RCS campaigns in India, this is the practical reality underneath all the regulatory back-and-forth: the reporting and detection infrastructure is maturing fast, independent of whether the Third Amendment gets finalized as drafted, watered down, or delayed. Non-compliant sending — unregistered headers, expired consent, miscategorized templates — is more likely to get caught, and caught faster, than it was even a year ago.

What This Means for Bulk SMS Senders Specifically

If your business relies on Bulk SMS for OTPs, transactional alerts, or promotional campaigns, here's what to actually watch for and act on:

Consent has a shelf life now. The seven-day validity cap on explicit consent (from the 2025 Second Amendment) means that if you're running promotional SMS campaigns based on customer opt-ins, you need to think about consent as something that needs periodic refreshing, not a one-time checkbox. Review how your consent-capture flow works and whether it's built to handle this.

Header categorization needs to be exact. With the P/S/T/G prefix system now standard, make sure every registered sender header on the DLT platform is categorized correctly for what it's actually being used to send. Mismatched categorization — sending promotional content through a transactional-categorized header — is exactly the kind of pattern AI-based detection systems are being built to catch.

Complaint thresholds are lower. With only five complaints now needed to trigger enforcement action (down from ten), campaign hygiene matters more than ever. A poorly targeted promotional blast that annoys a small fraction of recipients can trigger action faster than it used to.

If you use automated voice/IVR alongside SMS, prepare for A2P declaration requirements. Should the Third Amendment finalize as drafted, advance declaration of automated voice call traffic will likely become mandatory, potentially alongside a per-call termination charge designed to discourage bulk robo-dialing.

What This Means for WhatsApp Business API Users

WhatsApp Business API traffic doesn't move through the DLT platform the way SMS does — it's governed primarily by Meta's own policies and template approval process, layered on top of India's broader consumer protection and IT laws. But the direction of TRAI's OTT-focused provisions is still relevant here for a few reasons:

Data-sharing obligations could eventually affect messaging platforms generally, not just voice-calling-focused OTT apps. If the current draft's data-sharing requirement for OTT platforms survives into the final regulation, it's reasonable to expect messaging platforms broadly — potentially including WhatsApp — to face new obligations around sharing certain traffic or sender-verification data with telecom operators, even if the mechanics look different from SMS-based DLT registration.

The broader anti-spam posture matters for template compliance. Even though WhatsApp template approval sits with Meta, not TRAI, the overall regulatory direction in India is unambiguously toward stricter sender verification, clearer message categorization, and faster consumer recourse against unwanted commercial communication. Businesses that are lax about WhatsApp opt-in practices today — sending marketing-category messages without clear consent, for instance — are operating against the grain of where Indian regulation as a whole is heading, even if TRAI itself isn't yet the direct enforcer for WhatsApp specifically.

RCS and WhatsApp are both explicitly named in industry commentary discussing the practical reach of TRAI's compliance regime — one industry analysis of the 2026 compliance landscape explicitly frames the obligation as applying to "a single promotional SMS, RCS card or WhatsApp message," reflecting how commercial-communication compliance in India is increasingly being discussed as a unified concern across channels, not siloed by platform.

What This Means for Google RCS Business Messaging

RCS sits in an interesting middle position. Structurally, RCS messages travel over the same mobile networks and default messaging apps as SMS, which arguably puts it closer to TRAI's traditional telecom jurisdiction than an over-the-top app like WhatsApp that operates entirely through its own application layer. That said, RCS Business Messaging is administered through Google's own approval and verification process for branded senders, similar in spirit to how Meta administers WhatsApp Business API template approval.

For now, there's no RCS-specific carve-out or additional obligation named explicitly in the current draft amendment. But businesses using RCS for rich campaigns should treat it with the same compliance discipline as SMS and WhatsApp — clear consent, accurate sender verification, and message categorization that matches actual content — both because it's good practice and because RCS is increasingly being grouped into the same "commercial communication" conversation as SMS and WhatsApp in industry and regulatory commentary.

The Core Tension TRAI Is Trying to Resolve

Stepping back, what's playing out here is a genuinely difficult regulatory balancing act, and it's worth understanding the tension itself, not just the rule changes:

On one side, telecom operators have a legitimate point: SMS and voice communication over Indian telecom networks are subject to some of the strictest anti-spam controls in the world — DLT registration, header approval, content template vetting, consent management, all enforced with real penalties. Meanwhile, OTT messaging platforms carrying comparable or greater volumes of commercial communication have operated under comparatively minimal Indian regulatory obligation. From a pure "same activity, different rules" standpoint, that's a hard asymmetry to defend indefinitely, especially as spam and scam activity increasingly migrates toward the less-regulated channel.

On the other side, OTT platforms and IAMAI have an equally legitimate concern: TRAI's jurisdiction was built for telecom services, not internet application platforms, and extending telecom-style data-sharing obligations onto OTT platforms raises real questions about regulatory overreach, the erosion of intermediary safe harbour protections that are foundational to how the internet operates legally in India, and the proprietary nature of platform data that represents genuine business investment.

TRAI's own chairman has effectively acknowledged this tension directly — noting that regulators globally need to balance fostering innovation against maintaining a fair, competitive marketplace, particularly given how inherently cross-border OTT services are. That's a harder problem than simply "extend the SMS rulebook to WhatsApp," and it's part of why this process has moved cautiously across nearly eight years, from the original 2018 consultation to today's still-unfinalized Third Amendment.

A Practical Compliance Checklist for 2026

Given everything above, here's a concrete checklist for businesses sending commercial communication across SMS, WhatsApp, and RCS in India right now:

For SMS and DLT compliance:

• Confirm your Principal Entity registration and all sender headers are current and correctly categorized (P/S/T/G) on the DLT platform

• Audit your consent-capture flow to account for the seven-day validity window on explicit consent for commercial/transactional communication

• Review promotional campaign targeting to minimize complaint risk, given the lower five-complaint enforcement threshold

• Make sure message templates match their registered category — don't send promotional content through a transactional or service-categorized header

For WhatsApp Business API:

• Ensure marketing-category template usage reflects genuine, documented customer opt-in

• Keep authentication and utility templates strictly limited to their intended use cases (OTPs, transactional updates) rather than blending in promotional content

• Stay current with Meta's own template policy changes, since India-specific regulatory pressure is likely to influence how strictly Meta enforces its own rules here over time

For RCS Business Messaging:

• Apply the same consent and categorization discipline as SMS/WhatsApp, even though RCS isn't yet explicitly named in TRAI's draft provisions

• Maintain clear sender verification with Google's RCS Business Messaging program

For automated voice/IVR (if applicable):

• Prepare for the likely introduction of advance A2P call declaration requirements

• Budget for the possibility of a per-call termination charge on automated outbound calling if the Third Amendment finalizes with this provision intact

General:

• Treat consent and complaint data as an audit trail — with faster grievance redressal and AI-based detection coming, the businesses least exposed will be the ones that can demonstrate clean consent records and low complaint rates

• Work with a compliance-aware BSP or DLT registration partner who tracks these amendments actively, rather than treating DLT/TCCCPR registration as a one-time setup task

What Happens Next

The consultation period for the Third Amendment closed in April 2026, with industry stakeholders — including major telecom operators like Airtel, and platforms like MyOperator — having filed detailed clause-by-clause responses. TRAI will now review this feedback before issuing a final regulation, which industry commentary currently expects sometime later in 2026, though TRAI hasn't committed to a specific date.

Given the contested nature of the OTT data-sharing provision specifically, it's plausible that the final regulation looks somewhat different from the draft — either softened in response to IAMAI's overreach objections, or held firm if TRAI and the government prioritize the telecom operators' fairness argument. The A2P voice call provisions, AI/ML detection mandate, and consumer-facing grievance redressal improvements seem less contested and more likely to survive into the final rule largely as proposed.

What's very unlikely to happen is a reversal back toward lighter-touch regulation. Every step TRAI has taken since 2024 — the renewed OTT consultation push, the Second Amendment's enforcement tightening, the DND/MySpeed app revamps, the Third Amendment draft — points in one consistent direction: more granular consumer control, faster enforcement, better detection technology, and a gradually closing gap between how SMS/voice and OTT platforms are treated from a spam-control standpoint.

Conclusion

TRAI hasn't (yet) built a licensing regime for WhatsApp, Telegram, or other OTT messaging apps, and its own 2020 position — that a comprehensive OTT framework wasn't warranted at the time — technically still stands. But the practical distance between "SMS is tightly regulated, OTT is barely regulated" has been shrinking steadily since 2024, and the draft Third Amendment to the TCCCPR represents the most concrete step yet toward pulling OTT platforms into India's commercial-communication compliance regime, at least on the data-sharing and spam-detection front.

For businesses running SMS, WhatsApp, and RCS campaigns in India, the message underneath all of this regulatory back-and-forth is consistent and worth internalizing regardless of exactly how the OTT provisions shake out: consent needs to be real and current, sender identity needs to be verified and correctly categorized, and message content needs to match its declared purpose. The businesses that treat this as an ongoing compliance discipline — not a one-time DLT registration checkbox — are the ones that will move through 2026's regulatory tightening with the least disruption.

TechtoNetworks tracks these TRAI amendments as part of our DLT registration and compliance support for clients, and we'll continue updating this space as the Third Amendment moves toward finalization. If you want a compliance audit of your current SMS, WhatsApp, or RCS setup against where these rules are heading, get in touch with our team.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is TRAI regulating WhatsApp and Telegram now?

Not through a licensing framework — TRAI's 2020 position against comprehensive OTT regulation technically still stands. However, the draft Third Amendment to the TCCCPR (2026) proposes requiring OTT platforms to share certain data with telecom access providers as part of a broader anti-spam push, which is a narrower but still significant form of regulatory reach into OTT platforms.

Has the TCCCPR Third Amendment been finalized?

No. It was released as a draft for consultation on 13 March 2026, the comment period closed in April 2026, and a final regulation is expected later in 2026, though no confirmed date has been announced.

What changed in the TCCCPR Second Amendment (2025) that's already in effect? Faster complaint processing, a lower complaint threshold (five instead of ten) to trigger enforcement, a seven-day cap on explicit consent validity, direct TRAI enforcement power against senders, and standardized P/S/T/G header category prefixes.

Does this affect my WhatsApp Business API costs or setup?

Not directly yet — WhatsApp Business API remains governed primarily by Meta's own policies. But the broader Indian regulatory direction toward stricter consent and sender verification is likely to influence enforcement and platform policy over time.

What should I do right now to prepare?

Audit your DLT header registrations and categorization, tighten your consent-capture and refresh process, review promotional campaign targeting to reduce complaint risk, and work with a compliance-aware provider who actively tracks TRAI amendments rather than treating registration as a one-time task.