Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) Blockchain and Telco — India
While everyone is busy talking about Corona aka Covid-19 for many months now. There’s been lot happening on governance side both in public and private sectors.
One of such interesting yet little worrying regulation is made by TRAI.
Mandating registration of Enterprises, Telemarketers who send marketing and service SMSs. This has been done to curb Unsolicited Commercial Communication (UCC) and improve mobile subscriber privacy within the country.
While it is good move to start thinking about curbing the SPAM in Telco space and improve customer experience, there are few concerns to be addressed before adapting the solutions.
Is SPAM the only prime concern for Indian Mobile user ? what about
Call drops?
Bad quality ?
Poor coverage ?
There are a lot more issues to address but we only talk more about DLT in this article.
Above all, what concerns more is the DLT implementation and its effectiveness !!
DLT is a form of Blockchain but its a private and permission-ed version of Blockchain. While it may retain all the inherent features of Blockchain like time stamping the data, immutability of records, distributed data etc.
But whether this form of system will solve the SPAM ?
As you can guess, it can only trace and serve as source of truth in case of dispute and investigation !!
Is that all ?
Yes, besides discouraging small telemarketers from doing this business as the registration may become a burden for them.
So now read about the possible shockers
It may kill small firms doing this business and only the mighty will survive !!?
More than anything, what concerns is
Whats going to happen to the DATA ?
Who is going to control the DATABASE ?
Since DLT platform is controlled and shared among few parties, mostly the Telcos !?? and their subsidiaries ? and it is a private platform unlike public blockchains where anyone can access the records on chain. So only those few parties have access.
They own this data now. And imagine what can be done with the huge data just by feeding to an AI/ML app? who will benefit from this ?
Is it really benefiting the end user from SPAM or creating huge data source for those owning the DLT platform ?
why cant it be a public chain ? of course, with some filters.
What do you think ? leave your thoughts. What could have been the better approach ?