India has prolonged its anti-spam regime to require caller-ID and call-management apps to share customers’ spam experiences with telecom operators, prompting spam-blocking app maker Truecaller to name the ruling anti-competitive.
On Friday, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the nation’s telecom regulator, amended guidelines governing industrial communications, making it necessary for call-ID and call-management apps that permit customers flag calls as spam or junk to ship these experiences to a blockchain-based platform maintained by telecom operators. The platform tracks industrial communications and enforces anti-spam guidelines.
The change, TRAI stated, is meant to broaden the pool of spam experiences obtainable for motion towards spammers, successfully connecting experiences collected by apps with the telecom trade’s enforcement infrastructure.
Nonetheless, Truecaller informed TechCrunch that it sees this requirement as a “one-way trade” that’s “anti-competitive,” arguing that it transfers commercially priceless knowledge from call-management apps like itself to telecom operators.
India is Truecaller’s largest market, accounting for well over 350 million of its more than 500 million monthly active users globally. The Stockholm-based firm makes use of neighborhood experiences alongside automated detection and different indicators to establish and block spam calls.
The principles come as India grapples with spam and fraudulent calls at huge scale. In its report in February, Truecaller stated its customers within the nation encountered around 42 billion spam calls in 2025, together with calls that had been blocked, labeled, or ignored. The corporate additionally acknowledged that it blocked practically 12 billion spam calls throughout the 12 months.
It isn’t the primary time Truecaller and the Indian regulator have been at odds over how spam calls ought to be dealt with. The Swedish firm beforehand objected to restrictions stopping call-management apps from mechanically labeling calls from sure government-designated quantity ranges as spam. It argued that the exemption may enable undesirable calls to flee its filters.
Nonetheless, Friday’s amendments retain that restriction and have barred call-management apps from blanket blocking, filtering, or spam-tagging calls from designated quantity sequence used for promotional, service, and transactional communications. Particular person customers can nonetheless select to dam such calls on their very own gadgets, the regulator stated.
“Whereas our knowledge and consumer sentiment clearly present that spam has skyrocketed attributable to this free go to spammers, now we have been compliant with this since late final 12 months,” A Truecaller spokesperson stated.
Sumeysh Srivastava, a associate at New Delhi-based consulting agency The Quantum Hub, who leads its telecom-regulation coverage work, stated the newest change bridges two distinct layers: telecom operators present the underlying community and run the blockchain-based anti-spam system, whereas caller-ID apps function on prime of the community to establish and filter calls.
That raises technical and jurisdictional questions, Srivastava informed TechCrunch, together with what reporting requirements apps must observe and the way the requirement will likely be enforced towards firms that aren’t themselves telecom operators.
A March draft proposed (PDF) utilizing India’s IT legal guidelines to implement the requirement. Nonetheless, Srivastava identified that the brand new announcement didn’t say whether or not that enforcement mechanism was retained within the closing guidelines.
Additionally it is unclear how a lot info the apps will even have to offer beneath the up to date regulation. Kazim Rizvi, founding director of New Delhi-based coverage suppose tank The Dialogue, informed TechCrunch that requiring an app to transmit a particular spam report made by a consumer is materially completely different from requiring it to share the broader datasets, repute indicators, or analytical techniques it makes use of to establish suspicious calls.
The principles will want readability on what info should be transmitted, how customers are notified or requested for consent, and the way that knowledge can subsequently be retained and used, Rizvi stated.
TRAI didn’t reply to TechCrunch’s questions on what info apps could be required to share and whether or not the rule would additionally apply to spam-reporting options constructed into smartphone working techniques and dialers resembling Android and iOS.
New guidelines for AI-powered calls
The amendments additionally handle the rising use of software program and AI voice brokers to make calls. Calls made mechanically, with no individual instantly dialing the quantity, will now fall beneath TRAI’s application-to-person (A2P) framework. That features robocalls and calls utilizing prerecorded or synthetic voices.
Corporations utilizing such techniques must declare their use and the telephone numbers concerned to their telecom operators prematurely. Undeclared A2P calls will likely be handled as spam, TRAI stated.
The important thing take a look at, Srivastava stated, is how a name is initiated, reasonably than merely whether or not it makes use of an AI-generated voice, leaving some uncertainty round AI-assisted calls that contain human initiation.
Satya N. Gupta, a former extra secretary at TRAI, informed TechCrunch that the brand new guidelines don’t limit companies from utilizing AI or different automated calling applied sciences, however as a substitute require them to reveal their use to telecom operators.
Telecom operators can even be allowed to levy a termination cost of as much as 5 paise (about 0.052 cents) per minute on A2P calls. Nonetheless, calls made utilizing sure designated quantity ranges will likely be exempt.
Rizvi informed TechCrunch that the brand new definition may additionally cowl calls made utilizing software program even when an individual remains to be concerned, resembling calls from contact facilities and click-to-call companies. “With out that distinction, the A2P class dangers changing into broader than the regulatory hurt it’s supposed to deal with,” he stated.
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