India has prolonged its anti-spam regime to require caller-ID and call-management apps to share customers’ spam studies 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 obligatory for call-ID and call-management apps that permit customers flag calls as spam or junk to ship these studies to a blockchain-based platform maintained by telecom operators. The platform tracks industrial communications and enforces anti-spam guidelines.
The change, TRAI mentioned, is meant to broaden the pool of spam studies out there for motion towards spammers, successfully connecting studies collected by apps with the telecom business’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 useful 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 studies alongside automated detection and different alerts to determine and block spam calls.
The foundations come as India grapples with spam and fraudulent calls at huge scale. In its report in February, Truecaller mentioned 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 said that it blocked almost 12 billion spam calls through the yr.
It isn’t the primary time Truecaller and the Indian regulator have been at odds over how spam calls must be dealt with. The Swedish firm beforehand objected to restrictions stopping call-management apps from robotically labeling calls from sure government-designated quantity ranges as spam. It argued that the exemption may permit 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 collection used for promotional, service, and transactional communications. Particular person customers can nonetheless select to dam such calls on their very own gadgets, the regulator mentioned.
“Whereas our knowledge and person sentiment clearly present that spam has skyrocketed on account of this free cross to spammers, we’ve got been compliant with this since late final yr,” A Truecaller spokesperson mentioned.
Sumeysh Srivastava, a accomplice at New Delhi-based consulting agency The Quantum Hub, who leads its telecom-regulation coverage work, mentioned 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 determine and filter calls.
That raises technical and jurisdictional questions, Srivastava informed TechCrunch, together with what reporting requirements apps should observe and the way the requirement will likely be enforced towards corporations 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 ultimate guidelines.
Additionally it is unclear how a lot data the apps will even have to supply underneath 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 person is materially completely different from requiring it to share the broader datasets, popularity alerts, or analytical methods it makes use of to determine suspicious calls.
The foundations will want readability on what data have to be transmitted, how customers are notified or requested for consent, and the way that knowledge can subsequently be retained and used, Rizvi mentioned.
TRAI didn’t reply to TechCrunch’s questions on what data apps could be required to share and whether or not the rule would additionally apply to spam-reporting options constructed into smartphone working methods and dialers comparable to 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 robotically, and not using a particular person straight dialing the quantity, will now fall underneath TRAI’s application-to-person (A2P) framework. That features robocalls and calls utilizing prerecorded or synthetic voices.
Firms utilizing such methods should declare their use and the cellphone numbers concerned to their telecom operators upfront. Undeclared A2P calls will likely be handled as spam, TRAI mentioned.
The important thing take a look at, Srivastava mentioned, is how a name is initiated, somewhat 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 prohibit companies from utilizing AI or different automated calling applied sciences, however as an alternative 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 continues to be concerned, comparable to calls from contact facilities and click-to-call providers. “With out that distinction, the A2P class dangers turning into broader than the regulatory hurt it’s supposed to deal with,” he mentioned.
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