OTT services may soon get are regulated by Trai

India is currently the world’s second-largest telecommunications market. As on March 31, 2023, there were 1.172 billion telephone subscribers in the country.

Over-the-top (OTT) communication services including Whatsapp, Signal , Zoom, and Google Meet and Telegram could be "over regulated" with the threat of encryption being compromised, said technology policy experts after the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) proposed to regulate such services in its consultation paper released recently.

Almost three years after it first recommended against creating a specific regulatory framework for over-the-top (OTT) communication services in the country is considering on how these services can be regulated. TRAI says the OTTs hugely impacted the telecommunication ecosystem worldwide in the past decade.

OTT services are currently regulated under the IT Act, which will soon be replaced by the proposed Digital India Bill. Trai's proposal to regulate OTT concerning, may threaten privacy, end encryption: Experts.

In view of the humongous growth of OTT 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 including regulatory, economic, security, privacy, and safety aspects.

The draft telecom Bill released by the Department of Telecommunication (DoT) last year had also recommended bringing OTT services under its ambit by creating a licensing regime for them. The IT Ministry is already the nodal ministry for regulating such services.

Besides these, TRAI is also trying to make a framework regarding the regulations. Will it be the same as the telecom providers or a new framework will be determined? “Prima facie, the websites that use dynamic IP addresses and are hosted on cloud servers can pose a challenge to conventional methods of blocking.

In 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.” This statement is released by TRAI in their paper.

It also opines that there may be scenarios where the targeted websites use Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (https) protocol, which 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."

Trai has listed 14 points including defining OTTs, asking if they need to be regulated, and what fines or regulations should be in place if warranted. Overall, TRAI's consultation paper is an important step in the process of considering the regulation of OTT services in India.

S Mohini Ratna, Editor, VARINDIA