India has decided that the best way to fight spam is to make sure everyone shares their homework. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) amended its commercial communications rules on Friday, requiring caller-ID and call-management apps to hand over users' spam reports to a blockchain-based platform run by telecom operators. The platform tracks commercial communications and enforces anti-spam rules.
TRAI says the move will broaden the pool of spam reports available for action, effectively connecting app-collected reports with the telecom industry's enforcement infrastructure. Truecaller, however, sees it as a "one-way exchange" that is "anti-competitive," arguing it transfers commercially valuable data from apps like itself to telecom operators. Nothing says "level playing field" like handing your competitor your user data.
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 company uses community reports alongside automated detection and other signals to identify and block spam calls. In February, Truecaller reported that its users in India encountered around 42 billion spam calls in 2025, including calls that were blocked, labeled, or ignored. The company also said it blocked nearly 12 billion spam calls during the year.
It's not the first time Truecaller and the Indian regulator have clashed over spam handling. The company previously objected to restrictions preventing call-management apps from automatically labeling calls from certain government-designated number ranges as spam, arguing the exemption could let unwanted calls slip through. Friday's amendments retain that restriction and bar call-management apps from blanket blocking, filtering, or spam-tagging calls from designated number series used for promotional, service, and transactional communications. Individual users can still choose to block such calls on their own devices, TRAI said.
"While our data and user sentiment clearly show that spam has skyrocketed due to this free pass to spammers, we have been compliant with this since late last year," a Truecaller spokesperson said. Translation: we're not happy, but we're not going to jail over it.
Sumeysh Srivastava, a partner at New Delhi-based consulting firm The Quantum Hub, who leads its telecom-regulation policy work, said the latest change bridges two distinct layers: telecom operators provide the underlying network and run the blockchain-based anti-spam system, while caller-ID apps operate on top of the network to identify and filter calls. That raises technical and jurisdictional questions, Srivastava told TechCrunch, including what reporting standards apps will have to follow and how the requirement will be enforced against companies that are not themselves telecom operators.
A March draft proposed using India's IT laws to enforce the requirement. However, Srivastava pointed out that the new announcement did not say whether that enforcement mechanism was retained in the final rules. It is also unclear how much information the apps will actually have to provide. Kazim Rizvi, founding director of New Delhi-based policy think tank The Dialogue, told TechCrunch that requiring an app to transmit a specific spam report made by a user is materially different from requiring it to share the broader datasets, reputation signals, or analytical systems it uses to identify suspicious calls. The rules will need clarity on what information must be transmitted, how users are notified or asked for consent, and how that data can subsequently be retained and used, Rizvi said.
TRAI did not respond to TechCrunch's questions about what information apps would be required to share and whether the rule would also apply to spam-reporting features built into smartphone operating systems and dialers such as Android and iOS.
The amendments also address the growing use of software and AI voice agents to make calls. Calls made automatically, without a person directly dialing the number, will now fall under TRAI's application-to-person (A2P) framework. That includes robocalls and calls using prerecorded or artificial voices. Companies using such systems will have to declare their use and the phone numbers involved to their telecom operators in advance. Undeclared A2P calls will be treated as spam, TRAI said.
The key test, Srivastava said, is how a call is initiated, rather than simply whether it uses an AI-generated voice, leaving some uncertainty around AI-assisted calls that involve human initiation. Satya N. Gupta, a former additional secretary at TRAI, told TechCrunch that the new rules do not restrict businesses from using AI or other automated calling technologies, but instead require them to disclose their use to telecom operators. Telecom operators will also be allowed to levy a termination charge of up to 5 paise (about 0.052 cents) per minute on A2P calls. However, calls made using certain designated number ranges will be exempt.
Rizvi told TechCrunch that the new definition could also cover calls made using software even when a person is still involved, such as calls from contact centers and click-to-call services. "Without that distinction, the A2P category risks becoming broader than the regulatory harm it is intended to address," he said. So, in summary: India wants to fight spam, Truecaller wants to keep its data, and everyone agrees the rules need more clarity. Shocking.