It doesn't do this on my phones.
I did just find and disable the RCS Config Service, too, and testing that everything still works.
https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons...
The problem is that the phones generally only come with 15GB of data a month, and an average web page can easily run to 200MB now, so usually by the third day of the month they are all out of data.
There is a better federal plan for poor people called ACP which allows you to get your own phone and plan, but it isn't as well-known.
Wait, what? How did it come to that? I thought it was more like 50 MB if not even less. Thank God we have ad blockers.
> guys on every street corner trying to get you to take a free smartphone or a tablet with 15GB of data a month
Would it be possible to get it as a tourist?
And of course the prompt has a large blue button to enable, and a very small text underneath to dismiss, making it easy to accidentally enable it. It happened to me a few times already.
It also tells you nothing about the downsides (that you need a data connection, mainly) that would make RCS unusable to certain people... So they trick users into subscribing then users begin experiencing difficulties receiving or sending texts and they don't understand why.
Thank you, Google.