iMessage was explicitly determined to be out of scope of the DMA [1], simply because there isn't a meaninful user base in Europe (as is the case in almost the entire world except for the US).
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/13/23990679/apple-imessage-e...
I don't think it's suspicious. Almost nobody uses SMS in Europe anyway so this change is almost meaningless over here. It's just WhatsApp and then a little bit of Telegram, Signal etc on top.
I'm honestly not sure why anyone drives this (in Europe). I used to work for a mobile operator and RCS was a big thing around 2006-2009 in our R&D department. Then I changed to others jobs and almost didn't believe my eyes when it resurfaced with Google over a decade later. I was absolutely sure it was a dead horse already in 2009.
I'm not even sure what RCS is, other than a replacement text service that American phone companies offer. I am not aware that it's something that I could use over here.
RCS is an old standard that was discarded by everyone else about 15 years ago.
Only North America is adopting it. Late.
Per Wikipedia:
"In early 2020, it was estimated that RCS was available from 88 operators in 59 countries with approximately 390 million users per month. By November 2020, RCS was available globally in Google Messages on Android, provided directly by Google if the operator does not provide RCS. By 2023, there were 800 million active RCS users on Google's platform and 1.2 billion handsets worldwide supporting RCS."
Per my calendar: 2020 was << 15 years ago.
https://daringfireball.net/2024/02/eu_rcs_imessage
I’d be more concerned if RCS was replacing an encrypted protocol. Going from SMS to unencrypted RCS is still an improvement, and it’s hard to imagine it being less secure than SMS already is. And at least with RCS they have the possibility of implementing encryption in the future, which they don’t with SMS.
Using RCS E2EE is trivial. The way google does it is to simply pack signal protocol messages in the RCS message payload. It works great and it's simple.
Key identities are managed with a central identity server (like signal does) of course but that's because it's only supported on Google's jibe platform.
This can be trivially resolved by having each carrier who supports E2EE to host a key identity server so that you can lookup keys by phone number (which RCS already uses to point you to the right federated carrier service).
All that's missing from RCS having E2EE by default is google having literally anyone else adopt RCS forcing them to properly federate E2EE.
The EU forcing Apple to adopt a cleartext protocol like RCS is deeply suspicious. Interoperability will force disclosure of message contents to the state and carrier.
(unless your phone vendor has implemented encryption in their implementation. Ie: optimistic encryption aka can’t trust if it is truly working)
Use encrypted messaging protocols — iMessage, signal, WhatsApp…
Tell the government and the carriers to pound sand and <encrypted>……