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 the RCS ecosystem in the country. The move is aimed at strengthening protections against unwanted messages and fraud on the platform, the companies said.

India has emerged as a particularly challenging market for spam and fraud across messaging channels, driven by the country’s vast mobile user base, rapid growth in digital payments, and aggressive enterprise marketing practices. In 2022, complaints about unsolicited ads on Google’s RCS — delivered primarily through the Google Messages app — were significant enough to prompt the company to temporarily pause business promotions on the platform in India. However, some users continue to report frustration with spam messages on Google Messages, suggesting the issue has not fully abated.

Airtel said it had been cautious about deeper alignment with Google’s RCS until traffic could be routed through its own spam controls, highlighting carrier concerns about rising fraud risks.

“We had not onboarded Google because we first wanted RCS messages to be routed through the Airtel spam filter,” an Airtel spokesperson said.

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 enforcement of users’ do-not-disturb preferences. Airtel described the move as a “global first” for integrating a telecom operator’s spam filtering directly into an over-the-top messaging platform, though the companies did not provide comparative details.

“We are committed to continuing to work with the broader ecosystem of carriers to create a consistent and trusted messaging experience for RCS users around the world,” Sameer Samat, president of Android ecosystem at Google, said in a statement. The comment signals the company may look to extend the model beyond India as it works to standardize security across the RCS ecosystem.

India represents a critical market for Google’s messaging ambitions, with more than a billion internet users and over 700 million smartphone users. The country is also home to over 853 million WhatsApp users, according to World Population Review, underlining the scale of competition in mobile messaging.

Prabhu Ram, vice president for the industry research group at CyberMedia Research, said the deeper carrier integration reflects efforts to plug longstanding weaknesses in rich messaging ecosystems that have been vulnerable to spam and fraud.

“The efficacy of this partnership should be reflected in metrics such as reductions in spam volume, user complaints, and fraud incidence, as well as improvements in engagement with legitimate messages,” Ram told TechCrunch.

Airtel has been stepping up its anti-spam efforts over the past year, saying its AI-led systems have blocked more than 71 billion spam calls and 2.9 billion spam messages, helping drive a nearly 69% drop in fraud-related financial losses on its network.

More broadly, Google has been positioning RCS as the successor to SMS, saying in May 2025 that the standard was handling more than a billion messages daily in the U.S., based on a 28-day average.

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