On July 19, 2018, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (‘TRAI’) notified the Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulation, 2018 (‘Customer Preference Regulations’) to curb the problem of unsolicited commercial communication (popularly known as ‘spam’). The Customer Preference Regulations, inter alia, provide for: (i) registration of senders (businesses and telemarketers) with telecom service providers to reducing the ability of unknown entities reaching customers with calls and messages that are fraudulent or otherwise of dubious nature; (ii) registration of headers, i.e. alphanumeric string of characters or numbers assigned to a sender of commercial communications for segregating different types of messages related to one time passwords, balance enquires, flight alerts, special offers, etc.; and (iii) complete control to the subscriber to consent to receiving commercial communication and the ability to revoke the consent already granted. Additionally, the concept of registered templates for both message service and voice communication has been introduced to prevent deliberate mixing of promotional messages into the transactional stream.The salient features of these regulations also include the adoption of ‘distributed ledger technology’ (or blockchain) by telecom service providers to ensure regulatory compliance is carried out for sending commercial communication. Every telecom service provider is required to develop an ecosystem, with the prescribed functions, to regulate the delivery of the commercial communications to customers.