View: Scams don’t stop at telecom; India needs platform-neutral communication rules

India’s telecom sector operates under a stringent regulatory regime with rigorous, legally binding standards, oversight and enforcement mechanisms. As per GoI, in December 2025, about 40 lakh mobile connections were disconnected, and 1.3 lakh SMS templates used by spammers were blocked by Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) system.

But this is only the telecom sector. Digital communication platforms have remained largely untouched by such scrutiny. In other words, messaging apps, email services and social media (SM) platforms, carrying much larger volumes of person-to-person and business-to-consumer traffic, face none of the corresponding accountability for what flows through them.