India, April 16 -- For companies in the business of connecting people, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile often don't seem terribly interested in the details of actually doing that. At times, being a customer of either one of these three giants can be more frustrating than it should be, given all the money they extract for basic service.

The most recent example of this disinterest is the collapse of the Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative (CCMI) joint venture the companies announced in 2019. The goal of the effort was laudable: launching Rich Communications Services (RCS) messaging services. Such services are handy because they allow message senders to see whether their recipients actually received the message, among other functions.

But apparen...