The decision is said to be a precautionary measure to prevent misuse of the technology to fuel communal violence, ahead of the Ayodhya land dispute verdict.
Although in the state of Jammu and Kashmir all SMS services have been under suspension for some time now, this is the first time the ban on bulk messaging has been extended to the entire country.
The pan India ban was initially supposed to be for a period of 72 hours, but has now been extended till September 30 due to the deferment of high court's verdict on the Ayodhya issue by a week.
The ProblemThe decision will not impact individual SMSs sent between mobile subscribers. However, various essential messaging services including alerts from banks, financial institutions, railways, airlines etc. have been blocked.
This means that a customer won't receive an SMS alert regarding transactions made using his bank account or credit card, or related to cancellation or delay of trains and flights.
COAI, the GSM lobby, had requested DoT on Friday to relax the ban for some essential services for the benefit of subscribers. Nevertheless, once the request was granted operators expressed their inability to comply with it.
An official working with a private telecom operator said, "Every operator has different limitations. In some cases, filtering of SMS is possible as there are codes (such as TD, LM etc.) assigned to different institutions."
Industry viewsThe general feeling in the industry is that banning of bulk SMSs might not be a solution to the problem the government is trying to deal with. The industry believes that if the government wishes to stop miscreants from provoking citizens, it should ban every communication medium in the country as well such as emails, pamphlets, brochures etc.
Satyakalyan Yerramsetti, chief executive officer and founder of bulk messaging company SMS Country, asked, "If they didn't ban regular peer to peer SMS, email, online social networks and websites, why are they banning bulk SMS?"
Beerud Sheth, chief executive officer of social messaging service SMS GupShup agreed. He said, "The government's decision to ban bulk SMS and MMS is a well intentioned but misguided effort. The internet medium cannot be controlled, even if the mighty government tried to. So, it seems like the government is merely banning whatever it does control, while leaving huge, gaping loopholes in other media."
In fact, some experts believe that by banning the medium, the government is preventing the proliferation of positive messages too.
It's not that the industry is totally unsupportive and sees national concern as a secondary concern. Stakeholders believe that filtering objectionable messages is a much better option than banning the medium itself.
Sheth shared, "To the extent censoring is the right strategy, implementing a content filter is a far better solution than banning the whole medium."
The main question that arises is whether or not filtering bulk SMSs is possible.
Sheth added, "We have the ability to filter objectionable messages, in real time, across very high volume of messages. Our content filter is a smart, learning based filter that can catch offensive messages, including the many syntactic and semantic variations."
Suggesting a similar option, Yerramsetti said, "There are two mechanisms by means of which filtering of messages can be done. One is to simply block messages with the help of keyword for example in this case words like Babri Masjid, Ayodhya, Ram Mandir etc. can be blacklisted. Secondly, we can identify our customers and allow messages by banks, airlines or services like Justdial."
Another mobile messaging solutions provider Air2web differs in opinion. A company official said that the firm has a large number of clients and that it registers 15 million SMSs every day. It is apparently not possible for the company to keep track of every message.
On the other hand, Vishal Nongbet, senior director and head of marketing, SMS GupShup, explained that operators cannot be held responsible for filtering messages. He said, "The onus of filtering messages is on VAS players like us and not the carrier. They just provide the bandwidth and cannot filter the messages."
Hence, when operators are the originators of SMSs, they can help filter them.
Yerramsetti, however, feels that despite the availability of a solution, operators are not interested and have put a blanket ban is place.
Industry woesDespite being levied for a short period of time, the ban on bulk SMSs will "negatively impact the whole ecosystem of mobile operators, aggregators, enterprises and businesses, all of whom rely on messaging to operate their business," said Sheth.
In fact, SMS GupShup estimated a 30 per cent drop in its revenue this month. "End of the month brings best business for us so the ban has hit us at a crucial time. 30 per cent seems reasonable estimation of lost revenue," informs Nongbet.
SMS GupShup is currently the biggest social network in India connecting a user base of 35 million people, and accounts for 5 per cent of the SMS traffic generated in the country.
Similarly, SMS Country said it will lose out on business of around Rs 40-45 lakh in a week's time due to the ban. The Hyderabad-based bulk SMS solutions provider currently registers two crore SMSs daily.
Jagdish Mitra, chief executive officer, CanvasM, opined, "Although the ban is for short term, it will definitely impact business, especially of the advertisers and promoters. But we look at a long term scenario; we can utilise filtering of messages constantly to avoid similar situations in future."
He added, "Aggregators should build up a monitor-able database through which they can later validate services of the clients. Also, this will make the organisation sending the message liable for the content"
Yet, the question remains, what would happen if the verdict on the disputed Ayodhya issue is deferred again? Will the ban on the services be lifted, or will the mechanisms for filtering messages be implemented?
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