Operators accepted the challenge – Kommersant FM

Mobile operators can create a unified system for labeling calls from companies. The business will have to pay for the service. This way the client will be able to understand that a courier or bank is trying to contact him. That is, this is not spam, but a call from a trusted company. Now operators are independently developing such tools, writes RBC. But market players admit that the system may become unified.

Does this mechanism have any prospects? IT expert Sergei Vilyanov believes that the concept itself is interesting, but it is unlikely to work in practice: “I think this is a good idea if considered in the abstract. It is also good for business, since quite adequate companies, for a number of reasons, end up in certain databases and cannot reach their clients. Giving people the opportunity to cleanse themselves is the right thing to do, because there are fewer and fewer numbers without some kind of negative connotation.

I can’t quite imagine how all the operators will agree with each other, because everyone’s appetites and approaches are different. In principle, a cat and a mouse can come to an agreement, and in the end it will not end well, because one day the cat will forget that they agreed.

At the same time, operators are actually developing such services – each has its own spam filter. There is still room for manipulation here. If now everyone seems to be sitting in the same puddle, everyone is equal, then now it turns out that you will have to pay for inclusion in the white list. This will be an official paid service, and anyone who doesn’t use it won’t be quite on the same level as everyone else.”

According to MegaFon, since the beginning of the year, spam traffic in Russia has increased by more than a third. In January, clients received 30 million such calls per month. And by August, the number had grown to almost 50 million. A business that does not use the call marking service really risks finding itself in less favorable conditions, agrees Sergei Ermolenko, a partner at the law firm OrlovaErmolenko. But, according to him, everything depends on the implementation – there are no questions about the mechanism itself:

“There is nothing illegal about this. The mechanism can be considered as a kind of promotion method; in a sense, it is similar to advertising.

But here it is really important to take into account that there is collective dominance in the market for services provided by mobile operators.

That is, each player individually is not dominant, but together they have large shares, so they are often required to be monopolists. It turns out that if such a service is provided under different conditions or in some cases some kind of discrimination arises, then there may indeed be claims against the operators. The question is not the service itself, but how it will be implemented.”

Telecom operators regularly come to the attention of the antimonopoly service. In September, the FAS became interested in the practice of paid Internet distribution. And she stated that it is illegal to take money from clients for such a service.

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Ilya Sizov