Spam-blocking app maker Truecaller criticized the ruling as anti-competitive as India expanded its anti-spam regime to require caller ID and call management apps to share users’ spam reports with carriers.
India’s telecom regulator, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), on Friday amended rules governing commercial communications to require caller ID and call management apps that allow users to flag calls as spam or junk mail to send those reports to a blockchain-based platform controlled by carriers. The platform tracks commercial communications and applies anti-spam rules.
TRAI said the changes are aimed at expanding the pool of spam reports available to take action against spammers and effectively linking reports collected by apps with the telecom industry’s enforcement infrastructure.
However, Truecaller told TechCrunch that it believes this requirement is a “one-way exchange” that is “anti-competitive” and transfers commercially valuable data from call management apps like its own to carriers.
India is Truecaller’s largest market, with well over 350 million monthly active users out of more than 500 million worldwide. The Stockholm-based company uses community reporting, along with automatic detection and other signals, to identify and block spam calls.
The rules come as India grapples with large-scale spam and scam calls. Truecaller said in a February report that its users in the country would encounter about 42 billion spam calls in 2025, including calls that were blocked, labeled or ignored. The company also said it blocked about 12 billion spam calls over the year.
This is not the first time Truecaller and Indian regulators have clashed over how to handle spam calls. The Swedish company had previously opposed restrictions that would prevent call management apps from automatically classifying calls from certain government-specified number ranges as spam. They argued that the exemption could allow unwanted calls to escape the filters.
But Friday’s amendments maintain that restriction, prohibiting call management apps from comprehensively blocking, filtering, or spam-tagging calls from designated number series used for promotional, service, or transactional communications. Individual users can still choose to block such calls on their devices, the regulator said.
A Truecaller spokesperson said: “Our data and user sentiment show that this free pass to spammers has led to a spike in spam, and we have been complying since late last year.”
Sumeesh Srivastava, a partner at New Delhi-based consulting firm Quantum Hub who leads telecom regulatory policy efforts, said the latest changes bridge two different tiers. Carriers provide the underlying network and run blockchain-based anti-spam systems, while caller ID apps operate on top of the network to identify and filter calls.
This raises technical and jurisdictional questions, including what reporting standards apps must follow and how this requirement applies to companies that are not carriers, Srivastava told TechCrunch.
The March draft proposal proposes using India’s IT Act to enforce the requirements (PDF). However, Srivastava noted that the new announcement does not say whether that enforcement mechanism will remain in the final rule.
It’s also unclear how much information apps actually have to provide under the latest regulations. Kazim Rizvi, founding director of The Dialogue, a New Delhi-based policy think tank, told TechCrunch that requiring apps to submit specific user-generated spam reports is very different from requiring apps to share extensive datasets, reputation signals, or analytical systems they use to identify suspicious calls.
Rizvi said the rules need to be clear about what information needs to be submitted, how users are notified or consent is sought, and how that data can then be retained and used.
TRAI did not respond to TechCrunch’s questions about what information apps must share and whether the rules also apply to spam reporting features built into smartphone operating systems and dialers, such as Android and iOS.
New rules for AI-powered calls
The amendments also address the increased use of software and AI voice agents to make phone calls. Calls that are made automatically without a person directly dialing a number will now fall under TRAI’s Application-to-Person (A2P) framework. This includes robocalls and calls that use prerecorded or artificial voices.
Companies using such systems must declare their use and associated phone numbers to carriers in advance. According to TRAI, undeclared A2P calls will be treated as spam.
Srivastava said uncertainty remains about AI-assisted calls that involve human initiation, as the key test is not just whether to use AI-generated voice, but how the call is initiated.
Satya N. Gupta, former additional secretary at TRAI, told TechCrunch that the new rules do not restrict companies from using AI and other automated calling technologies, but instead require carriers to disclose their use.
Telecom operators will also be allowed to charge up to 5 paise (approximately 0.052 cents) per minute for A2P calls. However, calls made within some designated number ranges are not covered.
Rizvi told TechCrunch that the new definition could also cover calls made using software even when a person is involved, such as calls from contact centers or click-to-call services. “Without that distinction, the A2P category risks becoming broader than the regulatory harms it seeks to address,” he said.
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