Jorge – thanks – I missed that part, which is really important

But copying the text here too:

The thing missing in the article is the key for Google business: the Hub for carrier aggregation. One of the big problems for RCS (and any other carrier-based service) is interoperability across carriers.

This means making sure that when you send a message to an user from another carrier, that works. This may feel obvious in the Internet age, but it was a big issue for calling, SMS or MMS and it still is for RCS.

So besides providing the mobile app and the server infrastructure for RCS to carriers, the BIG PIECE they are providing is a hub, so they can ensure that any carrier connected to the hub can send and receive RCS messages to the rest of them.

This simplifies interoperability a lot, and also puts Google in an interesting position regarding A2P business. Because if you are a business and you want to reach your customers you don’t want to have to learn which is their carrier and connect to it. You can connect to Google.

That’s why Google says it’s ok they cannot read users messages and give control of that to carriers. They don’t need that because the piece most valuable for the advertising business is having access to the complete inventory of the RCS channel by selling access to business.

They will share revenues for this with carriers but regardless of the size of this market Google will get the bigger piece overall.

And they don’t care that much that users don’t really use RCS for P2P as long it becomes a default preinstalled entry point in all devices. It will still be a valuable inbox for business.

Of course the risk is that it becomes an ignored channel because it becomes used only for spam (like it’s already happening to SMS today) and that business will not care about that channel if they have a better alternative to reach users

And this is the key point: the main threat for Google RCS is not WhatsApp but WhatsApp for Business (and the operator dynamics that have a good chance of grinding the whole ecosystem to a stop – again)