India forces caller-ID apps to feed spam experiences to telcos

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 obligatory for call-ID and call-management apps that allow 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 mentioned, is meant to broaden the pool of spam experiences accessible for motion towards spammers, successfully connecting experiences collected by apps with the telecom business’s enforcement utilities.

However, Truecaller instructed TechCrunch that it sees this requirement as a “one-way trade” that’s “anti-competitive,” arguing that it transfers commercially beneficial information 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 alerts to establish and block spam calls.

The guidelines 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 have been blocked, labeled, or ignored. The firm additionally said that it blocked practically 12 billion spam calls through the 12 months.

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 routinely labeling calls from sure government-designated quantity ranges as spam. It argued that the exemption may enable undesirable calls to flee its filters.

However, 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. Individual customers can nonetheless select to dam such calls on their very own gadgets, the regulator mentioned.

“While our information and consumer sentiment clearly present that spam has skyrocketed as a consequence of this free go to spammers, we’ve got been compliant with this since late final 12 months,” A Truecaller spokesperson mentioned.

Sumeysh Srivastava, a companion at New Delhi-based consulting agency The Quantum Hub, who leads its telecom-regulation coverage work, mentioned the most recent 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 instructed TechCrunch, together with what reporting requirements apps must observe and the way the requirement can 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. However, Srivastava identified that the brand new announcement didn’t say whether or not that enforcement mechanism was retained within the last guidelines.

It can be unclear how a lot info the apps will even have to offer underneath the up to date regulation. Kazim Rizvi, founding director of New Delhi-based coverage suppose tank The Dialogue, instructed TechCrunch that requiring an app to transmit a particular spam report made by a consumer is materially totally different from requiring it to share the broader datasets, fame alerts, or analytical techniques it makes use of to establish suspicious calls.

The guidelines will want readability on what info have to be transmitted, how customers are notified or requested for consent, and the way that information can subsequently be retained and used, Rizvi mentioned.

TRAI didn’t reply to TechCrunch’s questions on what info apps can be required to share and whether or not the rule would additionally apply to spam-reporting options constructed into smartphone working techniques and dialers equivalent 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 routinely, with no particular person straight dialing the quantity, will now fall underneath TRAI’s application-to-person (A2P) framework. That consists of robocalls and calls utilizing prerecorded or synthetic voices.

Companies utilizing such techniques must declare their use and the cellphone numbers concerned to their telecom operators upfront. Undeclared A2P calls can be handled as spam, TRAI mentioned.

The key check, Srivastava mentioned, is how a name is initiated, quite 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, instructed TechCrunch that the brand new guidelines don’t prohibit 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 may also be allowed to levy a termination cost of as much as 5 paise (about 0.052 cents) per minute on A2P calls. However, calls made utilizing sure designated quantity ranges can be exempt.

Rizvi instructed TechCrunch that the brand new definition may additionally cowl calls made utilizing software program even when an individual continues to be concerned, equivalent to calls from contact facilities and click-to-call companies. “Without that distinction, the A2P class dangers turning into broader than the regulatory hurt it’s supposed to deal with,” he mentioned.