All company need to make money, it's just a matter of when and how, Facebook's resources may have even did them good, as they can stay away from predatory investment funds that otherwise would bite they hard in the end.
RCS can't come fast enough. https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/what-is-rcs-messaging/
Current state of messaging across the world is super messy and sucks, but believing that telecoms are the answer is just naive.
While sms allows you to communicate cross providers, the amount of money they charge, both historically and even nowadays for that is just insane. Att still charges $0.25 for international text messages, in 2018. Due to fragmentation of the market, the only way for them to stay in the game is to have something that’s shared, but boy, they do plan to make a lot money out of it.
And their Wechat helped created the biggest misinformation system, the so called self-media.
For physical mail it makes sense that the cost is mostly for actually handling actual pieces of mail. But for telecoms the main cost is fixed - so it makes more sense to pay for the network and then actually using it is free, or at worst, using it only costs extra if you're such a big user that you increase those fixed costs.
I pay £7 per month for this phone service. I believe the number of calls is theoretically limited (I've never hit the limit) but the number of text messages isn't.
So you pay for phone calls? I don't think the message you are replying to is suggesting a cost per message. Just that it is usual for their to be a cost associated with the service (unlike WhatsApp at the moment).
But I underscore that the service is what's important here and that's what I'm willing to pay for, not the calls. Imagine you find that your phone company, without you noticing, actually dropped 20% of your incoming calls. You didn't pay for those calls so who cares right? No, you pay for service, delivering other people's calls to you reliably is part of that service.
I pay for YouTube Red or whatever it's called now, same rationale. I pay, I get the service. YouTube doesn't make videos about Minecraft, TLS, US law, or whatever, but the platform I watch them on needs paying for somehow and I'm damn sure I don't want to watch adverts.