India’s telecom regulator, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), amended the rules governing commercial communications on Friday to make it mandatory for caller-ID and call-management apps that let users flag calls as spam to send those reports to a blockchain-based platform maintained by telecom operators. The regulator said the change is intended to broaden the pool of spam reports available for enforcement, effectively connecting app-collected reports with the telecom industry’s anti-spam infrastructure, which tracks commercial communications and enforces the rules.

Truecaller immediately criticized the requirement as a “one-way exchange” that is “anti-competitive,” arguing that commercially valuable data moves from call-management apps to telecom operators. India is Truecaller’s largest market: it accounts for well over 350 million of the company’s more than 500 million monthly active users globally. The Stockholm-based company relies on community reports, automated detection, and other signals to identify and block spam. In its February report, it said users in the country encountered around 42 billion spam calls — calls that were blocked, labeled, or ignored — and that it blocked nearly 12 billion of those during the year.

This is not the first conflict between Truecaller and the Indian regulator. The company had previously objected to restrictions that prevent call-management apps from automatically labeling calls from government-designated number ranges as spam, warning that the exemption would let unwanted calls escape its filters. Friday’s amendments keep that restriction in place and go further by barring apps from blanket blocking, filtering, or spam-tagging calls from designated number series used for promotional, service, and transactional communications. Individual users may still block such calls on their own devices, according to the regulator. A Truecaller spokesperson said the company has been compliant with the restriction “since late last year,” even while arguing that its data shows spam has risen because of the “free pass to spammers.”

These updates raise open technical and jurisdictional questions. Sumeysh Srivastava, a partner at The Quantum Hub, told TechCrunch that the new mandate bridges two layers: telecom operators run the network and the blockchain-based anti-spam system, while caller-ID apps sit on top and identify calls. That creates questions about what reporting standards apps must follow and how the requirement can be enforced against companies that are not telecom operators. A March draft proposed using India’s IT laws for enforcement, but Srivastava noted the final announcement did not confirm whether that mechanism was retained. It is also unclear how much data the apps must actually provide. Kazim Rizvi, founding director of The Dialogue, told TechCrunch that transmitting a specific spam report made by a user is materially different from sharing broader datasets, reputation signals, or analytical systems. The rules, he said, 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. TRAI did not respond to TechCrunch’s questions about whether the rule also applies 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 in calls. Calls made automatically, without a person directly dialing the number, now fall under TRAI’s application-to-person (A2P) framework, including robocalls and calls with prerecorded or artificial voices. Companies using these systems must declare their use and the phone numbers involved to their telecom operators in advance; undeclared A2P calls will be treated as spam. Srivastava said the key test is how a call is initiated, rather than simply whether it uses an AI-generated voice, leaving uncertainty around AI-assisted calls that still involve human initiation. Satya N. Gupta, a former additional secretary at TRAI, said the rules do not restrict businesses from using AI or automated calling technologies; they only require disclosure to operators. Telecom operators are also allowed to levy a termination charge of up to 5 paise (about 0.052 cents) per minute on A2P calls, though calls using certain designated number ranges are exempt. Rizvi warned that the new definition could also cover software-initiated calls involving a person, such as contact-center calls 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.