Comment by rezonant

> I thought this was a board filled with futurists? Can we really imagine no future scenario where the RCS spec gets E2EE?

The quality of posts on this site notably declines when Apple needs to be defended. You get posts lacking intellectual curiosity abundant, seemingly not putting in the work to think critically about policy implications, what's best for the industry, or even how technologies work. You'd be forgiven for thinking you were on Reddit on these threads, as the typical respondent fails to read the other threads, fails to learn from each other, fails to be deep and thoughtful about their position, their arguments and the positions and arguments of their fellow chatters.

You see the same misconceptions and the same falsehoods long debunked on every previous thread discussing these matters regurgitated with confidence. And it's another struggle to try to educate on these issues.

Thanks for approaching this with curiosity and a desire to improve these standards, it's so unfortunate so many who would claim themselves technologists would embrace the status quo and ignore what's possible in the future.

Google implemented E2E four years ago. While they could have got started (and announced that they had gotten started) on the path to standardization of standard E2E on day one, it takes a lot of time for this stuff to be developed. It goes a lot faster though when Apple and Google work together, because the usual stakeholders (GSMA) are forced to move faster.

What Google's approach proves is that it is perfectly possible to layer E2E encryption on top of RCS in a way that does not require a carrier to add their own support, which is something I am sure Apple is interested in. For details on that here is Google's white paper: https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf