Let it not rain SMSes

What is expected from PTA is establishment, implementation of policies along with robust regulatory mechanism.

Its 3am and you are suddenly woken up by a barrage of unsolicited SMSes on your cell phone. It could be someone offering to clean your water tank or sending a qualified teacher for home tuition or even suggesting herbal medicines to add to your virility.

The latest addition to this melee are the pre-recorded voice messages — you answer your phone and someone on the other end is reciting a monologue telling you about how great a candidate he’ll be for upcoming elections.

We lawyers also face a salvo of uninvited messages in relation to bar elections. Local club elections are also a great boon for such bulk SMS service providers as thousands of SMSes are sent to the ill-starred members.

This all leads us to think, isn’t there a law to regulate this mayhem? The regulatory authority i.e., the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) issued regulatory orders titled, “Protection from Spam, Unsolicited, Fraudulent and Obnoxious Communication Regulations, 2009”.

‘Obnoxious communication’ under the regulations means the transmission of a message/statement with the intent of causing harassment or disturbance. Spamming includes harmful, fraudulent, misleading, illegal or unsolicited messages in bulk to any person without the express permission of the recipient or causing any electronic system to show any message. All mobile service providers are required to establish a standard operating procedure to control spamming.

Under the regulations, the mobile service providers are duly bound to establish a round-the-clock complaint handling mechanism. In accordance with Part IV of the Telecom Consumer Protection Regulation 2009, further operators are required to launch a media campaign both in electronic and print media to educate subscribers and general public of the available preventive and subsequent complaint mechanisms for handling spamming, unsolicited, fraudulent and obnoxious communication. But the ground reality is that the pursuant of the promulgation of the regulations, the complaint handling mechanism established by the operators, leaves a lot to be desired. Some are even charging subscribers for providing such services and some have an upper limit of numbers which can be blocked. Others want you to re-subscribe on a monthly basis. On the whole, the mechanisms are not very user-friendly, rather tedious and time consuming.

It’s rather surprising that when, under the regulations, ‘obnoxious communication’ means transmission of message/statement with an intent to cause harassment or disturbance and when ‘spamming’ includes unsolicited messages, then why isn’t the PTA waking up and stopping such unwanted SMSes and pre-recorded statements.

Such SMSes are not only a local dilemma. In India, the situation was very similar until recently and such unwanted SMSes were a nuisance for all. I remember on my last trip a couple of years ago, the Indian number I was using was inundated with such SMSes. Every day, I would get an SMS from some pundit jee who claimed to be sitting somewhere in the Himalayas and would open doors of fortune upon my life by making my Janam Kundli. When things got really out of control, the regulatory body in India finally woke up from its slumber and now, under the law, every service provider is required to ensure that commercial communication including SMSes is sent to a customer only between 9am and 9pm. Though this does not make the situation ideal, but I have been told that the number of such unsolicited SMSes has been greatly reduced.

No one can underestimate the value of informative SMSes when it comes to my bank informing me about my transactions or being informed about parent teacher meeting or the office of the high court sending weekly cause lists in advance or the amazing money transfer schemes which is great boon for the public at large. But the ‘obnoxious and unsolicited communication’ bit has become part like a parasite.

What is required and expected from the PTA is the establishment and implementation of policies along with a robust regulatory mechanism ensuring that such spamming is regulated and controlled within strict parameters with regard to timings and content so that subscribers can enjoy the benefits of SMSes without the service becoming a modern-age nuisance.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 28^th, 2014.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.