Google is looking to address the long-standing RCS spam problem in India. But you are not alone.

With ongoing spam complaints clouding Google’s Rich Communication Services (RCS) push in India, the company is turning to deeper carrier integrations to bolster protection on its platform.

On Sunday, Bharti Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator with over 463 million subscribers, said it had partnered with Google to integrate the carrier’s network-level spam filtering into India’s RCS ecosystem. The move is aimed at strengthening protection against unwanted messages and scams on the platform, the company said.

India has emerged as a particularly challenging market for spam and fraud across messaging channels due to its massive mobile user base, rapid growth in digital payments, and aggressive corporate marketing practices. In 2022, complaints about unwanted ads from Google RCS, mainly delivered through the Google Messages app, led the company to temporarily stop promoting businesses on the platform in India. However, some users continue to report complaints about spam messages in Google Messages, suggesting that the problem has not been fully alleviated.

Airtel said it had been cautious about working closely with Google’s RCS until traffic was routed through its own spam controls, highlighting the telco’s concerns about increased fraud risks.

“We initially did not engage Google because we wanted RCS messages to be routed through Airtel spam filters,” an Airtel spokesperson said.

Under the partnership, Airtel’s network intelligence will be combined with Google’s RCS platform to enable real-time verification of business messages, including sender identification, spam detection, and enforcement of users’ Do Not Disturb preferences. Airtel did not provide comparative details, but described it as a “world-first” move to integrate the telco’s spam filtering directly into its over-the-top (OTT) messaging platform.

“We are committed to continuing to work with the broader carrier ecosystem to create a consistent and reliable messaging experience for RCS users around the world,” Sameer Samat, president of Google’s Android ecosystem, said in a statement. The comments are a sign that the company may be looking to expand its model beyond India as it works to standardize security across the RCS ecosystem.

India is an important market for Google’s messaging ambitions, with more than 1 billion internet users and 700 million smartphone users. According to World Population Review, there are over 853 million WhatsApp users in the country, highlighting the scale of competition in the mobile messaging space.

Prabhu Ram, vice president of the industry research group at CyberMedia Research, said the increased carrier consolidation reflects efforts to address 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 volume, user complaints, reduced fraud rates, and improved engagement with legitimate messages,” Ram told TechCrunch.

Airtel has been ramping up its anti-spam efforts over the past year, saying its AI-based systems have helped reduce fraud-related financial losses on its network by nearly 69% by blocking over 71 billion spam calls and 2.9 billion spam messages.

More broadly, Google has been positioning RCS as the successor to SMS, and as of May 2025 the standard said it was processing more than 1 billion messages per day in the United States, based on a 28-day average.

Google did not say whether similar carrier integrations are planned for other markets or provide an estimate of how much the move could reduce spam and fraud.