The EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) takes aim at tech giants like Facebook, Google and Apple on their monopolistic practices and to limit the market power of these companies.
The Digital Markets Act (DMA) will ban certain practices used by large platforms acting as “gatekeepers” and enable the Commission to carry out market investigations and sanction non-compliant behaviour.
The text provisionally agreed by Parliament and Council negotiators targets large companies providing so-called “core platform services” most prone to unfair business practices, such as social networks or search engines, with a market capitalisation of at least 75 billion euro or an annual turnover of 7.5 billion. To be designated as “gatekeepers”, these companies must also provide certain services such as browsers, messengers or social media, which have at least 45 million monthly end users in the EU.and 10 000 annual business users.
The DMA has been in process for a long time, when the first draft came out, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) pointed out the following:
A key element that could reduce the dependence of users on a few gatekeeper platforms is interoperability. Interoperability in ancillary services such as payment processing is nice to have, but not good enough. Art 6(f) under the DMA proposal will have the result that, for example, Facebook might have to let a competitor offer its own payment processing for Oculus apps, but not offer a competing social media network that interoperates with Facebook. Only a general interoperability obligation for platforms’ core services will foster innovation and put users back in control of their data, privacy, and online experience.
We appreciate that the EU Commission introduced a real-time data portability mandate into the DMA under which platforms must provide effective tools that facilitate the exercise of data portability, and continuously and in real-time. However, data portability is only the low-hanging fruit of interoperability, as users can’t take advantage of it unless they have and keep an account on the gatekeeper service (and are thus still subject to potentially abusive terms of service).
Adversarial Interoperability
One of the biggest things this law does is forces interoperability among different messaging apps from the big tech companies. This will ensure that iMessage will be able to send messages to WhatsApp and vice versa.
Interoperability is very important as Cory Doctorow wrote:
For a really competitive, innovative, dynamic marketplace, you need adversarial interoperability: that’s when you create a new product or service that plugs into the existing ones without the permission of the companies that make them. Think of third-party printer ink, alternative app stores, or independent repair shops that use compatible parts from rival manufacturers to fix your car or your phone or your tractor.
Adversarial interoperability was once the driver of tech’s dynamic marketplace, where the biggest firms could go from top of the heap to scrap metal in an eyeblink, where tiny startups could topple dominant companies before they even knew what hit them.
But the current crop of Big Tech companies has secured laws, regulations, and court decisions that have dramatically restricted adversarial interoperability. From the flurry of absurd software patents that the US Patent and Trademark Office granted in the dark years between the first software patents and the Alice decision to the growing use of “digital rights management” to create legal obligations to use the products you purchase in ways that benefit shareholders at your expense, Big Tech climbed the adversarial ladder and then pulled it up behind them.
I agree with the idea and principles behind interoperability, my concern is that forcing messaging apps to interoperate with each other may cause additional security vulnerabilities or weaken the security of the communications. If a user is using an app that does not have end to end encryption, how is that message secured? The person who is using the unsecured app is now allowing the entire conversation between them and another person or even a group of people to be unencrypted.
It will certainly be interesting to see how this is handled once this law passes and companies are forced to implement these interoperability requirements.
