SMS is truly open and isn’t overseen by any central authority. Although obviously your carrier needs to support it, you aren’t forced to choose from among a few SMS providers. As I understand, RCS is a partially proprietary protocol under the guise of an open standard. As I understand, your carrier doesn’t handle RCS. Instead it’s routed through an RCS provider, and that provider is currently an extension of Google.

To me it seems like RCS is just Google’s attempt to take over text messaging, and even though SMS has some serious flaws, I feel like a corporate controlled system is even worse.

Am I wrong about RCS? Is it really an open standard? When I search for details, it’s mostly about how SMS is bad with pictures and thus RCS is great, but nothing about how RCS makes its way from one phone to another.