A day before the deadline for counter comments to expire, TRAI ordered all stakeholders to mention ‘Do not display my ID’ in the subject line of mail, in case they do not wish to publicize their email ID. This is after the regulator drew criticism for displaying email IDs of over one million stakeholders who responded to its net neutrality and OTT regulatory framework consultation paper.
The regulator has asked people to identify themselves with ‘proper name for identification and display’ in the counter comments.
“Since many of the emails had only email ID as the header, for easy identification of the stakeholders’ comments, the comments were segregated date-wise along with their email IDs and uploaded,” TRAI said. TRAI said that it will filter the spam mails, duplicate emails etc before publishing the comments online.
TRAI said that the stakeholders has .themselves requested to publicize their comments on the regulator’s website alongside other comments, which is a normally followed practice in public consultation.
TRAI even came under DDos attack, after releasing email IDs of the stakeholders. In a move to stop the spammers from accessing those email IDs, TRAI even munged the email IDs by changing the IDs, by replacing with symbols like ‘@’ to (at) and ‘.’ to (dot).