The Verge: “EU targets Big Tech with sweeping new antitrust legislation”

The EU has unveiled its biggest ever legislative effort to balance competition in the tech world. The new Digital Markets Act, or DMA, is intended to rein in the power of the largest tech corporations and allow smaller entities to compete with the mostly US-based firms. So far, the EU has tackled antitrust issues on a case-by-case basis, but the DMA is intended to introduce sweeping reforms that will address systemic issues in the whole market.

Today’s announcement targets interoperability of messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage, with the EU saying that vendors will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms, if they so request. The EU says that this should give users more choice in how they send messages, without having to worry about what platform the recipient is on. There’s also a requirement that users should be able to freely choose their browser, virtual assistants or search engines.

The legislation hasn’t passed yet — the EU says the language has to be finalized and checked, at which point it’ll have to be approved by Parliament and Council. In a press conference held early Friday morning, Vestager said she expects DMA to come into force sometime in October. Owners of messaging platforms will likely have staggered obligations, from three months to four years, depending upon the complexities of the integrations requested.

James Vincent

As usual whenever the EU moves forward with legislation against US tech giants, there was a flurry of negative comments claiming that this initiative will be banning privacy and encryption in the name of competition law and similar nonsense (mostly coming from the US tech giants themselves).

Adi Robertson talks to Margrethe Vestager about regulating big tech in the EU

The thing is… iMessage for example is already interoperable with SMS, and has been from the start. While SMS is an ancient standard in Internet years, messaging apps could integrate the newer RCS as a compatibility layer for competing apps, so when people using different apps exchange messages, these would be relayed via RCS instead of whatever proprietary method each messaging service is using. Delivery via RCS (or whichever interoperable solution is ultimately adopted) could also act as backup for the main service during massive outages, as WhatsApp experienced last autumn because of its dependency on Facebook’s infrastructure.

Apps may choose to differentiate these threads in the interface, to highlight to possible loss of security, as Apple is doing with distinct colors for iMessage vs. SMS. The encryption argument is generally silly, as there are hundreds of millions people happily messaging through Telegram and Facebook Messenger, neither of which are end-to-end encrypted by default. Clearly encryption is not a major concern for them.

I am especially curios to see if this new regulation manages to force Apple into allowing other browser engines on iOS, or if the company will find some loophole to continue its practices.