India’s Anti-Spam Framework Needs Dynamic Consent Enforcement

Unwanted promotional messages often continue to reach customers based on consent provided during an earlier interaction, such as opening an account, signing up for a service or filling out a form. However, customer preferences can change, raising concerns over whether old consent should remain valid indefinitely.

India has developed a comprehensive anti spam framework through the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR), Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), entity and template registration requirements, and the Digital Consent Acquisition (DCA) framework.

The key challenge now is ensuring that consent reflects the customer’s current preference at the time a promotional message is delivered.

Under the proposed DCA framework, consent is largely acquired and maintained upstream by Originating Access Providers (OAPs). However, the Terminating Access Provider (TAP) the subscriber’s own telecom operator has the direct customer relationship and handles spam complaints and customer preferences.

This creates a gap between consent acquisition and consent enforcement.

The DLT ecosystem data highlights the concern. Of the 32,095 blacklisted entities, nearly 87% are associated with two OAP-only telecom operators. One accounts for around 53%, while another represents approximately 34%. During the quarter ended March 2026, nearly 40% of all blacklisted templates were linked to a single operator.

A TAP led consent management approach could help address this gap by allowing the customer’s telecom operator to capture, validate, store and enforce consent based on current preferences. This could also enable faster handling of consent withdrawals, complaints and customer protection measures.

Such a model would align accountability with authority, enable real-time consent verification, strengthen data governance and bring consent management closer to the subscriber.

India has already established a strong foundation for combating spam. As fraudulent communication methods continue to evolve, the focus now needs to move from simply recording consent to ensuring that consent remains valid when a commercial message is actually delivered.

Ultimately, meaningful consent should reflect what customers want today not merely what they agreed to in the past.