The European Union may be very close to dealing an unprecedented blow to the great North American technology companies. After years of sanctions and fines that apparently have not tickled, the new Digital Markets Law (WFD) agreed by Parliament and the European Commission can change everything. In short, in its most visible effect, could force companies to agree so that a WhatsApp user can write to a Telegram user and vice versa.
Europe thereby defends interoperability between different providers. It is better explained with some examples. Email is an open standard across multiple providers, companies or tools (Gmail, Outlook, own provider…), as well as phone calls or SMS. Not so, however, messaging applications. Can you imagine only being able to call mobile phones that have contracted the same company as you? Well, something like that is understood to happen from the side of Brussels with chat applications.
The DMA also brings several more possible changes that can affect from application stores to search engines and websites, but we will not go into them now. If you are interested, here we explain all the possible effects of this new regulation here.
There is no clear date for its possible application, but it is believed that the standard, agreed by the Parliament and the Commission, could be definitively approved in the summer and give companies 6 months to adapt. The rule, in particular, is aimed at large companies that provide so-called “central platform services” that are more prone to unfair commercial practices, according to the EU, and that have a market capitalization of at least 75 billion euros or an annual turnover of 7.5 billion.
Thus, European users of these platforms could exchange messagessend files, or make video calls across apps from whatever your messaging app is to another.
But it’s not all bright lights. Several experts, although it is true that especially from the North American side, have strongly criticized the idea because it would be much more complicated, if not impossible, to encrypt messages or combat spam.
So… Why does Europe want to force this?
Europe’s other motives: opening up European options and breaking WhatsApp’s monopoly
We have given the example of WhatsApp and Telegram, but to this we could add Signal, Discord, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, Google Chat… And, of course, any European alternative that might arise. For now, the Swiss teleguard (although it is not an EU territory) or the German or Ginlo Private could be the beneficiaries.
Brussels has been falling far behind in the technological race against the United States and Chinatwo countries now with more than palpable tensions due to their trade war and that has ended up leaving the old continent in a kind of no man’s land.
In recent years, and to curb or at least have greater control over foreign technology companies, their use of data and the null benefits they leave as foreign companies, the Union has promoted various measures. From the well-known GDPR to the famous ‘Google Tax’still without specifying the latter or directly paralyzed.
These are all responses by the EU to recover part of its “technological sovereignty”, something that already seems very complicated to face, especially after the fall of the once continental giants such as Nokia. A desert of big Big-Tech in front of the famous GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft).
“We want to find European solutions and companies in the digital age,” Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said at a press conference in February 2021 when a roadmap for Europe’s technological upgrading and curbing its further dependence was presented. full of intentions rather than concrete measures. In fact, many of them, such as EU countries being able to prevent or at least put restrictions on the purchase of European start-ups by foreign companies, depend on a legal analysis that is expected to last another year.
If you want Spotify, the great European technology, has as much market share in the United States as it has in Europe, due to the greater weight of alternatives such as Apple Music or Tidal.
And that’s where WhatsApp comes in. While in the United States the market share is divided fairly evenly between iMessage, Facebook Messenger and Meta’s own chat, in Europe WhatsApp is almost a religion. That monopoly is to a great extent what also worries Europe.
According to one poll from BEREC, a telecommunications think tank that supports the European Commission, 74% of Europeans use WhatsApp as their main communication platform.
The case of Spain is especially decisive. According to the survey, in Spain 90% of users use WhatsApp as the main means of communication, in the lead and far from Germany (79%), the second. It is curious, however, that in eastern and northern countries such as Estonia, Lithuania, Sweden or the Czech Republic, Messenger leads against WhatsApp. In any case, also from Meta.
One more reason to bet on interoperability.
Behind this there is also an obvious background in terms of advertising monopoly. “Above all, the law prevents any form of over-regulation for small businesses. App developers will gain entirely new opportunities, small businesses will have more access to business-relevant data, and the online advertising market will be fairer.” explained when the regulation was presented by the rapporteur of the Parliament’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection Commission, the German Andreas Schwab.
All the doubts that there are about the norm
One of the decisions is whether the European version of each product can coexist with the version from the rest of the world, something that seems key.
But in addition to this, regarding the security of communications, there are also several doubts, especially from the United States.
Steven Bellovin, a renowned Internet security researcher and computer science professor at Columbia University, explained to TheVerge what “there would be no way to merge different forms of encryption between applications with different design features”. In other words, there would be no way to maintain different encryption processes.
This would open doors to spam, disinformation control or privacy, according to the experts who have given their opinion to the North American media so far.