The European Union has taken its latest shot at big technology companies with the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a proposed law that it says will open up the market to smaller competitors and give consumers more choice and freedom.
The EU has brought a number of cases against technology firms over the past two decades in the belief that they were acting in a monopolistic or unfair way: Google, Apple and Microsoft, among others, have faced lawsuits. The DMA aims to stamp out these alleged practices in one fell swoop.
What does the law say?
The final text hasn鈥檛 yet been released, but we already know it will be wide in scope 鈥� and have teeth. Tech companies will have to allow their services to be connected with those of competitors, so that people using WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, which are both owned by Meta, can communicate seamlessly with Apple鈥檚 iMessage.
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People will also be given the right to remove pre-installed software from devices they buy, so you could get rid of Google software from a laptop sold by Google, or Apple鈥檚 built-in apps from an iPhone.
Companies will also be banned from automatically cross-promoting their services, so Google鈥檚 web search, for instance, won鈥檛 be allowed to show its other services, such as YouTube Music, at the top of search results or demote competitors, such as Spotify.
Which firms will the law apply to?
Companies that meet a number of requirements: those with a value of 鈧�75 billion or over, those that have at least 45 million monthly users and those that operate via an app, website or social network. This captures obvious candidates such as Meta, Google and Apple, but also smaller companies like Booking.com. Any company found to have broken the law could be hit by fines of up to 10 per cent of its global turnover, and up to 20 per cent for repeated infringements.
When will these changes begin?
The draft text of the act was , but will need to be formally approved by both the European Parliament and Council. Once that is done, there will be a buffer of 20 days before it becomes law, and the rules will start to apply six months later.
What will happen for people outside the EU?
Because of the complexity of offering different services in one country than another, the EU legislation is likely to be adopted as global by most companies, meaning that the benefits of more consumer choice won鈥檛 be confined to Europe. A similar thing happened with the EU鈥檚 General Data Protection Regulation, which is designed to protect consumers鈥� data. Some countries that deal with the EU a lot , while some companies decided to introduce a more stringent policy globally for the sake of simplicity.
Are there any downsides?
The bulk of the proposals relate more to business practices than technology, but experts have warned that making messaging services interoperable is a large engineering hurdle. at UK law firm decoded.legal believes it carries the risk of compromising the end-to-end encryption currently offered to users of some services, such as WhatsApp. 鈥淚 fear that those pushing for this don鈥檛 understand the implications of what they are going to compel service providers to do,鈥� he says. 鈥淥r, worse, that they do understand the implications, and are pushing for it all the same.鈥�
Can鈥檛 tech firms find a solution?
at Royal Holloway, University of London, says that almost all messaging services use the same basic approach to cryptography, a technique known as the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, but tend to add their own 鈥渂ells and whistles鈥�.
鈥淚n theory, you can still have end-to-end encryption if everyone is using absolutely compatible protocols, which they鈥檙e probably not at the moment,鈥� says Martin. 鈥淭here鈥檚 a lot of complexity around making the cryptography protocols broadly compatible. It鈥檚 not something that anyone could do quickly. I would imagine for the people implementing these apps, it鈥檒l be a messy process.鈥�
But Martin says the law could ultimately be beneficial for security. 鈥淚 think standardisation and scrutinisation is a good thing,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 think possibly it would be a net gain for security if it meant that we had more high-profile, secure standards that everyone was using. There鈥檚 an argument that that鈥檚 a better world.鈥�
