Google stops businesses from using RCS for promotions in India, following reports that top banks and other companies are abusing the feature to send spam
Google has disabled businesses ability to use RCS for promotion in India, the company's biggest market by users …
Context & Ripple Effects
Business messaging on RCS was sold as a feature, not a liability: Google launched it in 2018 with rich messages to Sprint users backed by 40+ carriers and OEMs, then layered on trust tooling like Verified SMS labeling in nine countries. The India suspension is the first visible retreat from that pitch — top banks and other companies turned the promotional channel into a spam firehose in Google's largest market by users.
First-order effects
- Banks and businesses in India immediately lose the only rich-media promotional channel inside the default messaging app, forcing campaigns back to plain SMS or third-party apps.
- Google absorbs the reputational cost of its carriers-and-OEMs coalition: the interoperability it marketed is now something it has to police market by market.
Second-order effects
- Messaging aggregators and carriers that built RCS business-messaging revenue lines face a demand shock in their largest single market until Google offers a verified alternative.
- The episode pressures Google to ship stronger sender-verification tooling — the Verified SMS playbook — before it can re-open promotions anywhere else without repeating the abuse.
Third-order effects
- Access to an 'open' carrier standard is becoming conditional on Google's judgment: the same logic later showed up when Google blocked rooted Android phones from RCS, citing spam and abuse measures — the platform operator, not the standard, decides who gets in.
- If verification-gated access becomes the norm, business messaging consolidates around whoever controls the client and the trust layer, turning RCS from an open specification into a permissioned channel.
The trend: RCS is shifting from an open carrier-backed standard to a Google-policed channel, with spam abuse in key markets driving progressively tighter gatekeeping over who can send.