Regulators Haven't Come to Terms With Rich Communication Services and Consumer Risk
Regulators worldwide are still struggling with how they should treat rich communication services (RCS), speakers said Tuesday during a Mobile World Live webinar. RCS is an advanced communications protocol standard for instant messaging, primarily used on mobile phones and promoted by GSMA as a replacement for SMS and MMS messaging.
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“Regulators … are still very unsure or undecided on how they should treat RCS,” said Iftikhar Waheed, director of product management at Enea, a network and cybersecurity software company. Most regulators treat all messaging the same and haven’t distinguished between RCS and more traditional services, he said.
RCS "changes the playing field, it ... adds more challenges,” Waheed said. It's more prone to attack than some other forms of texting communications, since RCS' intent is to be “a bit open,” he said. “You’ve got multiple players coming in,” and “it’s going to be exposed on more fronts."
Waheed said some carriers are meeting with regulatory agencies to get them up to speed on RCS and what steps they can take to “address gaps.” Regulators tend to move only after they hear complaints from consumers, he said.
RCS business messaging is still much smaller than SMS and MMS and isn’t yet on the “radar” of most regulators, said Nick Lane, chief messaging officer at MobileSquared. When it gets “to scale,” that’s when regulators will likely “start to step in,” he said. “I wouldn’t expect that to happen in any market for a number of years.” Lane warned that most customers still know nothing about RCS or whether they’re even using it.
RCS is potentially prone to abuse, but companies are working on improving message verification, said Lodema Steinbach, vice president of product and carrier relations at messaging company Sinch. She recommended that companies follow best practices and guidelines established for other forms of messaging. “We know what the regulators already want, so let's make sure that we do it right the first time, so we don’t have to have the regulators tell us what to do.”
Some view AI as a “silver bullet” that will fix all problems, Waheed said. “When you look at things like spam, you need to constantly train that AI … and make it learn new detection patterns, new kinds of spam.” But when spammers make fake messages look just like the real thing, “you get an AI that’s being distrained, and there’s a deviation happening,” he said, which doesn’t work very well. “This is just going to be a long-running battle.”