Dear members of the FSFE discussion list,
Please allow me to share a concern of mine. A business initiative of Google, supported by Apple, is Rich Communication Services (RCS), an open standard to replace SMS [1] [2] [3]. Questions that I have: - Would it be a smart and wise decision to let a non-European business take control over replacing SMS? - Would it be a smart and wise decision to break SMS as a general accessible service? - What would consequences be for Free Software, the privacy and consumer rights of us Europeans, and the environment?
Best regards,
Do you have some specification about why it should be a problem that this new standard is a problem if managed by US companies?
Because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS says that the SMS technology started in Europe but it was a multi national collaboration with various organizations. Also I guess that there will be a retro compatibility with SMS.
Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services has retro compatibility and it is already offered since 88 operators and supported by the GSM association.
"In response to concerns over the lack of end-to-end encryption in RCS, Google stated that it would only retain message data in transit until it is delivered to the recipient." this because google added in their messages app the e2e encryption. Also "Google added end-to-end encryption to their Messages app using the Signal Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Protocol as the default option for one-on-one RCS conversations starting in June 2021"
So reading the page doesn't seem an issue that Google or Apple will add support to this protocol (except for the e2e encryption that depends on the app used) as it is managed everything by the operators.
Just my 2 cents reading a bit on wikipedia and nothing else.
Daniele Scasciafratte - OpenSource MultiVersal Guy daniele.tech https://daniele.tech - @Mte90Net https://twitter.com/Mte90net - GitHub https://github.com/Mte90 - Italian Linux Society council member http://www.ils.org/ - Mozillian https://people.mozilla.org/p/Mte90 Ex Mozilla Reps/TechSpeakers, WordPress Core Contributor https://profiles.wordpress.org/mte90, LibreItalia member http://www.libreitalia.it/, Wikimedia Italia member https://www.wikimedia.it/ and LUG Rieti founder http://lugrieti.linux.it/. Il 03/12/23 10:34, André Ockers ha scritto:
Dear members of the FSFE discussion list,
Please allow me to share a concern of mine. A business initiative of Google, supported by Apple, is Rich Communication Services (RCS), an open standard to replace SMS [1] [2] [3]. Questions that I have:
- Would it be a smart and wise decision to let a non-European business
take control over replacing SMS?
- Would it be a smart and wise decision to break SMS as a general
accessible service?
- What would consequences be for Free Software, the privacy and consumer
rights of us Europeans, and the environment?
Best regards,
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Thanks for bringing this up, I'm interested to learn more about this too. I don't know about RCS but let me add some related thoughts.
In the Netherlands we had SMS as a vendor-neutral text solution, later replaced by MMS with option to send images. Now WhatsApp and Signal are two most popular vendor-dependent solutions. MMS no longer works (I tried).
People used to pay for these services as part of the contract. With text moving to apps it is disconnected from your contract and mainly based on apps that have various income strategies. In most cases the consumer is not the one paying.
The silo's are also an issue as each app has its own network and features. EU regulation enforcing interoperability might improve the situation a bit.
Tangent to SMS is messaging in general. It used to be that airlines would send SMS updates for a delay or changed gate. Now they offer WhatsApp updates or in-app notifications.
I think for Free Software it is very important to have a messaging technology/service that is vendor-neutral, device/app-neutral, offers modern chat features and is financed in a sustainable way. Sending messages is a fundamental feature for many digital solutions. Making it neutral and interoperable helps reduce lock-in scenario's.
I hope somebody can share more details with regards to RCS.
Best, Nico