India's Anti-Spam Rules: Truecaller Cries Foul

India's telecom regulator, TRAI, has amended its commercial communications rules, compelling caller-ID and call-management applications to transmit user-flagged spam reports to telecom operators. This data will be fed into a blockchain-based platform used for tracking commercial communications and enforcing anti-spam measures. TRAI states this is intended to widen the scope of spam reports for action against offenders.

However, Truecaller, whose largest user base is in India, has labeled these changes as "anti-competitive." The company argues that the new regulations create a one-way data transfer, providing commercially valuable information to telecom operators without reciprocal benefit. This regulatory shift impacts India's ongoing battle against a massive volume of spam and fraudulent calls.

Previously, Truecaller had also contested restrictions on its ability to automatically label calls from certain government-designated numbers as spam. While Friday's amendments maintain such restrictions, they also prohibit call-management apps from broadly blocking or filtering calls from designated promotional, service, and transactional number series.

The amendments also introduce new regulations for AI-powered and automated calls. Such calls, including robocalls and those using prerecorded or artificial voices, will now fall under the application-to-person (A2P) framework, requiring companies to declare their usage and associated phone numbers to telecom operators in advance. Undeclared A2P calls will be treated as spam. Telecom operators are now permitted to charge up to 5 paise per minute on A2P calls, with exemptions for certain designated number ranges.

Questions remain regarding the enforcement mechanisms for these rules and the precise nature of the data that apps must share. Policy experts note the distinction between sharing individual spam reports and broader datasets used by apps for call identification. Clarity is also sought on user notification, consent, and data retention policies. TRAI has yet to respond to queries about the scope of information required and whether the rules apply to built-in smartphone operating system dialers.