RCS is a proprietary standard, but it is not owned or controlled by Google. They just happen to be one of the first major corporations to embrace and implement the standard.
A bunch of carriers implemented it originally, but their implementations were all horribly broken, with messages between carriers usually not working, the carrier-installed messaging apps sucking, etc. Eventually they all dropped it and Google picked up the ashes and "fixed it" by making their server the only one instead of having per-carrier servers like SMS/MMS.
Yeah, this really all feels like the carriers have dropped the ball.
RCS is a proprietary standard, but it is not owned or controlled by Google. They just happen to be one of the first major corporations to embrace and implement the standard.
A bunch of carriers implemented it originally, but their implementations were all horribly broken, with messages between carriers usually not working, the carrier-installed messaging apps sucking, etc. Eventually they all dropped it and Google picked up the ashes and "fixed it" by making their server the only one instead of having per-carrier servers like SMS/MMS.
Yeah, this really all feels like the carriers have dropped the ball.