{"id":1020777,"date":"2026-07-14T09:22:32","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T03:52:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/?p=1020777"},"modified":"2026-07-14T09:30:17","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T04:00:17","slug":"the-username-wars-indias-small-fight-over-a-very-big-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/2026\/07\/14\/the-username-wars-indias-small-fight-over-a-very-big-question\/","title":{"rendered":"The username wars: India\u2019s small fight over a very big question"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Government is asking why citizens should be allowed to talk without sharing phone numbers. In a democracy, that question runs the other way <\/p>\n<p>Sometime on July 2, a letter left the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology carrying one of the strangest regulatory questions ever put to a technology company. Addressed to Telegram and Signal, it asked, in essence: why should Indians be allowed to talk to each other without exchanging phone numbers?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Government is asking why citizens should be allowed to talk without sharing phone numbers. In a democracy, that question runs the other way Sometime on July 2, a letter left the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology carrying one of the strangest regulatory questions ever put to a technology company. Addressed to Telegram and Signal, it asked, in essence: why should Indians be allowed to talk to each other without exchanging phone numbers?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,80,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1020777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newspapers","category-telecom-the-pioneer","category-the-pioneer"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1020777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1020777"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1020777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1020783,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1020777\/revisions\/1020783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1020777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1020777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1020777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}