India forces caller-ID apps to feed spam reports to telcos
techcrunch ·
India’s telecom regulator, TRAI, has amended its commercial-communications rules to require caller-ID and call-management apps to send user spam reports to a blockchain-based platform operated by telecom companies. The regulator says the change will expand the pool of reports used to identify and penalize spammers. Truecaller, India’s largest caller-ID app by user base, criticized the requirement as an anti-competitive one-way transfer of commercially valuable data. The amendments retain restrictions on automatically labeling or broadly blocking calls from designated number ranges, although users may still block those calls individually. The rules also bring automatically initiated robocalls and calls using prerecorded or artificial voices under the application-to-person framework, requiring companies to disclose their use and relevant numbers to operators in advance. Undeclared A2P calls can be treated as spam, and operators may charge up to 5 paise per minute for some such calls. Experts say the rules still leave questions about the data apps must share, user consent, enforcement, and whether software-assisted calls involving people will be covered.
techcrunch