India has expanded its anti-spam rules to require caller-ID and call-management apps to share user-submitted spam reports with telecom operators, prompting Truecaller to argue that the requirement is anti-competitive. The amended rules also bring automated and AI-powered calls under a stricter reporting framework.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said the changes are intended to strengthen enforcement against unsolicited commercial communications by adding reports collected by third-party apps to the telecom industry’s existing anti-spam infrastructure. The system uses a blockchain-based platform maintained by telecom operators to track commercial communications and complaints.
Truecaller Objects to One-Way Data Sharing
Under the new rules announced on September 18, caller-ID and call-management apps that allow users to identify calls as spam or junk must pass those reports to telecom providers. Truecaller described the arrangement as a “one-way exchange,” arguing that commercially valuable data collected by independent apps would flow to telecom operators without equivalent access in return.
India is Truecaller’s largest market. The Stockholm-based company has more than 500 million monthly active users globally, with more than 350 million outside its other international markets concentrated in India.
Spam remains a large problem in the country. According to Truecaller’s 2025 India report, its users encountered about 41.68 billion spam calls during the year, including calls that were blocked, labeled or ignored, while nearly 11.89 billion were blocked.
The amended rules also retain restrictions preventing apps from automatically labeling or blocking calls from certain government-designated number ranges used for promotional, service and transactional communications. Users can still choose to block individual calls themselves.
AI and Automated Calls Face New Requirements
TRAI is also expanding its application-to-person, or A2P, rules to cover calls initiated automatically by software. Businesses using robocalls, prerecorded messages or artificial voices will have to declare the systems and phone numbers involved to their telecom providers before making calls.
Undeclared A2P calls can be treated as spam. Telecom operators will also be permitted to charge up to 5 paise per minute for terminating certain A2P calls, although designated number ranges will be exempt.
The rules focus primarily on how a call is initiated rather than whether an AI-generated voice is used. Policy specialists have warned that this distinction could also capture software-assisted calls involving humans, including some contact-center and click-to-call services, depending on how TRAI interprets the final requirements.
Questions also remain over what caller-ID apps must actually transmit. The regulation does not yet clearly establish whether companies need to provide only individual user spam reports or broader datasets and reputation signals used internally to classify suspicious numbers.
TRAI also has not clarified how the requirement would apply to spam-reporting functions built directly into smartphone operating systems and dialers such as Android and iOS. The regulator initially proposed the changes in a March consultation, which drew submissions from Truecaller, telecom providers and other industry groups.
Featured image credits: Magnific.com
For more stories like it, click the +Follow button at the top of this page to follow us.