The adoption of
a standard for interchange of messages between systems would be to the benefit of many. The adoption of
RCS would be to the benefit of
the wireless carrier companies, not their end users.
And the adoption of a standard in the context of the government putting a gun to the heads of the smartphone companies and saying "you are legally required to switch to RCS and get rid of your current messaging system" is to the benefit of the wireless carriers (who would make more money and have more control, if I'm understanding correctly), and would do a lot of harm to existing messaging companies and smartphone companies. Sure, it wouldn't be so bad for Google, since they're already using RCS (anyone want a list of the dozens of messaging systems that Google has developed, gotten users invested in,
and then abandoned, over the years?). Why choose RCS? Why write regulations
designed to give Google a win? Quoting from the
Wikipedia page for RCS:
RCS Business Messaging (RBM) is the B2C (A2P in telecoms terminology) version of RCS. This is supposed to be an answer to third-party messaging apps (or OTTs) absorbing mobile operators' messaging traffic and associated revenues. While RCS is designed to win back Person-to-Person (P2P) traffic, RBM is intended to retain and grow this A2P traffic.
Yes, the top of the paragraph is the business variant - read the underlined part, talking about the user-to-user part. Yes, it gives the end users some niceties, but the overall goal of RCS is not to help the end users, it's to wrest control of messaging away from IP-based systems and put it back in the hands of the wireless carriers. The carriers aren't happy that everyone went to IP-based messaging systems and away from SMS, which was ridiculously profitable for them. And, frankly, I have very little sympathy for the wireless carriers in this - their role (notwithstanding what it was 20-30 years ago) is to be a "dumb pipe", transferring IP-based data traffic (and voice... which also transfers as data these days), and they should be competing on performance (speeds, latency, etc.), service, support, and price. Not on trying to bring back the good old days of carriers reigning supreme, dictating equipment, software, and charging by "how important that data is to you" rather than by simply how much data is being sent through their network - keep in mind that 1 MB of data is very roughly equivalent to 7500 text messages - at 10 cents a piece, the carriers were effectively making $750 for 1 MB of data transfer when doing SMS (yes, it wasn't quite that simple). When everybody went to IP/data-based messaging apps, suddenly they were getting perhaps a few cents for that 1 MB of data, rather than $750. I'm sure they didn't like that turn of events. Would you argue that is was a tragic or unreasonable turn of events?
I'm all in favor of
encouraging the smartphone companies and messaging companies to work together to come up with interoperability mechanisms - and I really do mean "encourage" and not "have governments pass/adopt regulations requiring cooperation and/or some particular standard" (like RCS). Petition the companies, show them that huge, vast numbers of their customers want this.
If you want to involve the government, have them offer the company some very modest
benefit if they get together devise and implement a standard (and, again, "do X or we'll fine you" is not a carrot, it's the threat of a stick).
I was around and paying attention when a lot of the standards that now make the internet work, took hold and took off (I've worked with people who wrote some of the standards). Those standards didn't happen because a government put a gun to each company's head and said, "we've chosen a standard and you have to adopt it", these standards got adopted and put into wide use because a bunch of companies, universities, and other interested parties saw that it was to their mutual benefit to agree to implement them.
Setting up
legal requirements to adopt standards (before you've gotten universal consensus that the standard in question is the right one), is
not the same thing. Even if you
really want a standard adopted, like, yesterday.
You keep writing things that have a decided tone of "this sounds like a good idea and therefore should be mandated by law (and the alternatives should be made illegal)" (particularly given the context of a thread where the subject is the EU government passing laws to require standards). Please correct me if I'm getting that wrong.
