With persistent spam complaints holding back Google’s push for Rich Communications Services (RCS) in India, the company is looking to strengthen its integration with carriers to better protect its platform.
Bharti Airtel, India’s second-largest telco with over 463 million subscribers, announced on Sunday that it has partnered with Google to integrate its network-level spam filtering into the country’s RCS ecosystem. The companies said the move is aimed at increasing protection against unsolicited messages and scams on the platform.
India has emerged as a particularly challenging market for spam and fraud across messaging channels due to the country’s vast mobile user base, rapid growth in digital payments, and aggressive corporate marketing practices. In 2022, complaints about unsolicited ads on Google’s RCS, primarily distributed through the Google Messages app, became serious enough for the company to suspend business promotions on the platform in India. However, some users are still reporting complaints about spam messages on Google Messages, suggesting the problem has not been completely alleviated.
Airtel said it was cautious about deepening its collaboration with Google’s RCS until traffic was routed through its own spam controls, underscoring carriers’ concerns about increased fraud risk.
An Airtel spokesperson said, “We did not onboard Google because we wanted RCS messages to pass through Airtel’s spam filters first.”
Under the partnership, Airtel’s network intelligence will be combined with Google’s RCS platform to enable real-time checks on business messaging, including sender verification, spam detection, and enforcing Do Not Disturb settings on users. Airtel described the move as a “world-first” effort to directly integrate a carrier’s spam filtering into its over-the-top messaging platform, but the companies did not provide details of the comparison.
“We are committed to continuing to work with the broader ecosystem of carriers to deliver a consistent and reliable messaging experience for RCS users around the world,” Sameer Samat, president of Google’s Android ecosystem, said in a statement. This comment suggests that the company may be looking to expand this model beyond India as it works to standardize security across the RCS ecosystem.
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With over 1 billion internet users and over 700 million smartphone users, India represents a key market for Google’s messaging ambitions. According to World Population Review, there are more than 853 million WhatsApp users in the country, highlighting the scale of competition in mobile messaging.
Prabhu Ram, vice president of industry research group at CyberMedia Research, said the deepening carrier consolidation reflects an effort to close long-standing weaknesses in the rich messaging ecosystem, which has been vulnerable to spam and fraud.
“The effectiveness of this partnership should be reflected in metrics such as reduced spam volumes, user complaints, reduced fraud rates, and improved engagement with legitimate messages,” Lam told TechCrunch.
Airtel has ramped up its anti-spam efforts over the past year, saying its AI-driven systems have blocked over 71 billion spam calls and 2.9 billion spam messages, helping reduce fraud-related financial losses on its network by nearly 69%.
More broadly, Google is positioning RCS as a successor to SMS, announcing in May 2025 that the standard processes more than 1 billion messages daily in the U.S. based on a 28-day average.
Google did not say whether similar carrier consolidation is planned in other markets or provide estimates of how much the initiative would reduce spam and fraud.
