On Friday, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) amended rules for commercial communications to compel caller-ID and call-management apps that let users flag calls as spam or junk to transmit those reports to a blockchain-based platform operated by telecom providers. The platform is intended to track commercial communications and help enforce anti-spam regulations.
TRAI said the change aims to expand the set of spam reports available for action against spammers by linking app-collected reports with the telecom industry’s enforcement infrastructure. The regulator did not specify publicly which exact data fields apps must share, or whether the rule applies to spam-reporting features built into smartphone operating systems and native dialers such as Android and iOS.
Truecaller calls the requirement anti-competitive
Truecaller, the Stockholm-based caller-ID and spam-blocking app, criticized the measure as a one-way exchange that disadvantages third-party apps by transferring commercially valuable data to telecom operators. India is Truecaller’s largest market: the company says well over 350 million of its more than 500 million monthly active users are in India.
Truecaller’s reporting paints a large-scale spam problem in India. In its 2025 report, the company said Indian users encountered around 42 billion spam calls during the year — including calls that were blocked, labeled, or ignored — and that the service itself blocked nearly 12 billion of those calls.
This is not the first dispute between Truecaller and the Indian regulator. The company previously objected to regulatory exemptions that prevent call-management apps from automatically labeling calls from certain government-designated number ranges as spam. The latest amendments preserve that restriction: apps are barred from blanket blocking, filtering, or spam-tagging calls from designated number series used for promotional, service, and transactional communications, although individual users can still block such calls on their own devices.
A Truecaller spokesperson said the company’s data and user sentiment show spam has surged due to the regulatory carve-outs, and that the company has been complying with the rule since late last year.
Technical, jurisdictional and privacy questions remain
Sumeysh Srivastava, a partner at New Delhi-based consultancy The Quantum Hub who leads its telecom-regulation policy work, told TechCrunch the change stitches together two distinct layers: telecom operators provide the underlying network and run the blockchain anti-spam system, while caller-ID apps operate above the network to detect and filter calls. That raises questions about reporting standards, enforcement against non-telecom companies, and which legal mechanisms will be used to make apps comply.
A March draft proposed using India’s IT laws to enforce the requirement, but Srivastava noted the TRAI announcement did not specify whether that enforcement route remains in the final rules.
It is also unclear exactly how much and what type of information apps must transmit. Kazim Rizvi, founding director of New Delhi-based policy think tank The Dialogue, told TechCrunch that mandating the transmission of each specific user spam report is materially different from requiring apps to share broader datasets, reputation signals, or the analytic systems they use to detect suspicious calls. He said the rules need clarity on what must be transmitted, how users are notified or asked for consent, and how the data can subsequently be retained and used.
TRAI did not respond to questions about required data fields or the rule’s applicability to built-in OS dialers.
New rules for automated and AI-powered calls
The amendments also bring automatically-placed calls — including robocalls and calls using prerecorded or artificial voices — within TRAI’s application-to-person (A2P) framework. Companies that use such systems must declare their use and the phone numbers involved to their telecom operators in advance; undeclared A2P calls will be treated as spam, TRAI said.
Srivastava emphasized that the regulatory test is how a call is initiated (automatically by software versus human-dialed), not merely whether an AI-generated voice is used, leaving some ambiguity for AI-assisted calls that involve human initiation.
Former TRAI additional secretary Satya N. Gupta told TechCrunch the rules do not prohibit businesses from using AI or automated calling technologies, but require disclosure of such use to telecom operators.
Telecom operators will be permitted to charge a termination fee of up to 5 paise (about 0.052 US cents) per minute on A2P calls; calls from certain designated number ranges will remain exempt.
Kazim Rizvi warned that the broadened definition could sweep in software-assisted calls where humans still participate — for example, contact center calls or click-to-call services — and that without finer distinctions the A2P category risks becoming wider than the specific harms the regulation aims to address.
Takeaway
TRAI’s amendment links user-generated spam reports from caller-ID and call-management apps to a telecom-operated enforcement platform and expands rules for automated and AI-enabled calling. While the move aims to strengthen anti-spam enforcement, it leaves open important technical, legal and privacy questions — including what data must be shared, how compliance will be enforced, and how users’ consent and data protections will be handled. Truecaller and policy experts are calling for greater clarity and safeguards.
