Europe’s new Digital Markets Act aims to make larger messaging platforms ‘interoperable’ with smaller ones. No wonder the tech titans are running scared
The passage of GDPR (general data protection regulation) might seem like ancient history – as does everything before 2020 – but in legislative terms it was a mere blink of an eye ago and now the European Union has moved on to the next big thing. Prepare to start hearing a lot about the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
It’s one of two bills currently going through the EU’s institutions, alongside the confusingly similar Digital Services Act (DSA). As a rough split, the DSA is about the things that platforms host: it covers issues such as child sexual abuse imagery, content moderation and algorithmic curation.
The DMA, by contrast, is more about what the platforms do. It sets up a new legal definition of large tech platforms as “gatekeepers” – companies that provide a certain set of services to at least 45 million EU-based users or 10,000 business users – and loads them with a host of requirements intended to ensure that industries of the future can compete on a level playing field with the dominant companies of the present.
And, oh boy, have those requirements proved controversial. The final version of the text, agreed by the European parliament and council last month, limits the ability of gatekeepers to combine personal data from various sources for the purposes of targeted advertising. It requires companies (read: Apple and Google) to allow users to freely choose their browser, virtual assistants or search engines. It mandates those same companies to open up their platforms to third-party app stores. And, most controversially of all, it requires the largest messaging platforms to become “interoperable”.
“The largest messaging services will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms, if they so request,” the European parliament explains. “Users of small or big platforms would then be able to exchange messages, send files or make video calls across messaging apps, thus giving them more choice.”
It’s a big ask. Perhaps too big: the finalisation of the draft text has led to a vociferous pushback from much of the security industry, which has warned that it could spell doom for services such as WhatsApp. The heart of the problem lies in how platforms employ end-to-end encryption, which keeps messages safe from attackers and hides their content from the platform itself. For an interoperable service to be secure, each platform would have to agree to use exactly the same encryption protocol, work out a way to securely and accurately share encryption keys and figure out how to ensure that messages go to the right people on the right service.
Even if that’s solvable, there are more inherent downsides to the very concept of interoperability. One of the reasons why closed messaging services are more popular than open services such as email or SMS is because their closed nature allows for better control over things such as spam, phishing and malicious activity. If WhatsApp spots you sending a quarter of a million messages in three minutes, it can boot you off the service for good. But what if you simply download SpamApp and use your legal right to interoperability to send the messages anyway?
Yes, the act explicitly calls for interconnection only to be provided “while ensuring a high level of security and personal data protection”. But that’s cold comfort for tech companies, which fear at best a lengthy procedural standoff to prove that they cannot achieve the goals without compromising security and, at worst, a discovery that the EU, like many governments around the world, is actively eager to see the back of widespread end-to-end encryption.
The problem the industry now faces is convincing would-be allies that, this time, it really needs their help. From the outside, the scales look tilted: in the one corner, a group of companies that have cried the sky is falling every time key regulation has been proposed, but whose only real evidence of failure is an annoying cookie request on some websites. And in the other, a world of regulators that have spent 20 years woefully underprepared for the explosion of thorny problems caused by a new set of titans of industry. It’s tempting, with those as the players, to tell the industry to hold its nose and deal with whatever comes its way. After years of underregulation, would a few more of overregulation be so unfair?
But bad platforms come and go, while bad laws have an unfortunate habit of sticking around. The EU has too big an opportunity to waste it by laying incoherent demands to a few key players. Interoperability, open platforms and a level playing field for all are worthy goals, but let’s get it right first time.
What I’ve been reading
Climate of fear Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, Termination Shock, has all the elements that readers have come to expect from the veteran sci-fi author: deeply researched info-dumps about near-future tech, an unswerving desire to make billionaire tech executives into mythic heroes and about 200 pages too many. But seeing Stephenson turn his eye to the climate crisis for the first time is fascinating.
Blockchain gangOne of the interesting things about the rise of cryptocurrencies has been seeing the speed with which tech has been forced to rediscover the basic lessons of traditional finance. For an easier – and cheaper – way to learn from the errors of others, I enjoyed Gavin Jackson’s recently published book Money in One Lesson, which begins with cowrie shells and ends with bitcoin.
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