The EU no longer wants to be satisfied with the excessive market power of tech corporations. In view of data protection and competition concerns, this is more than understandable. Accordingly, the confederation wants to introduce new comprehensive rules for Facebook, Google and Co. with the “Digital Markets Act”. Now the members of the EU Parliament are in agreement with a surprisingly clear voting result. The new rules for large tech corporations are to come.
A real prestige project
It’s almost a travesty how big tech companies, among others, have trampled EU data protection rules underfoot in recent years. Not only that. Due to their partly dominant position in the market, they sometimes also acted in an anti-competitive manner. This is now finally to come to an end. The Digital Markets Act (DMA) will no longer allow companies to get away with such behavior. The regulations that affect online companies with a market capitalization of more than 80 billion euros primarily include those of a competition law nature. Based on the level of market capitalization, it quickly becomes clear that it is not small Internet companies that are the focus of policy here. Rather, the DMA is clearly targeting the big names a la Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta.
A “cross-messenger” as a duty?
One component of the DMA is the requirement for a so-called “interoperable messenger.” Don’t know what that means? Don’t sweat it, it was news to me too. Basically, the requirement can be summarized as follows: In the future, it must be possible to communicate with each other across messengers. In a sense, this is a kind of “cross-messenger”. Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party) as a member of the EU Parliament says about this:
“The top dogs among the messenger services and social networks must allow cross-platform use according to the will of the Parliament.”
What does this look like in practice? If you want to send a message via a messenger, this should not only be possible within the company’s own “messenger ecosystem”. For example, when using WhatsApp, you should also be able to send a message to a user from Signal.
Criticism comes from the experts
The idea of interoperable messengers sounds exceedingly practical at first glance. But what about the implementation of the whole thing? The experts from Bitkom have expressed rather skeptical views on this. Indeed, the IT association comments on the “cross-messenger” as follows:
“Not thought through to the end is the interoperability of messenger services demanded by the EU Parliament, which would make it possible to send messages between different messengers.”
As justification, the association of IT experts states that you can not compare modern messengers with simple mails or even SMS. The range of available features goes far beyond the usual. For this reason, a certain standard must first be found across all platforms, to which all companies adhere. But that is not all. In addition, Bitkom members are quite concerned about the consequences this could have for data protection.
“In addition to immense technical hurdles, there are also data protection concerns, as the usage and metadata of the users of one messenger service would then have to be passed on to the other services. In addition, customers often choose individual messenger services because they offer special features or privacy and security settings.”
Privacy requires new technical framework
To understand the problem exactly, you have to understand what Bitkom is complaining about. It is precisely the fact that two messenger services can access user data. On the one hand, there is the user’s own Messenger. It can not only see which message you send. It also collects comprehensive metadata about you. On the other side is the Messenger of the person you are writing to. This can also access personal data. However, while you give your own Messenger consent to this procedure, this is not the case with the chat partner’s Messenger.
Contrary to Bitkom, Evelyne Gebhardt from the Social Democrats in the EU Parliament supports the regulations in the DMA. In particular, there would be no concerns about data protection in the long term, as sufficient security could be ensured.
“There are technical ways to preserve encryption and data protection.”
To be able to assess this the parliamentarians have spoken together with experts. These probably explained that there is a way to be able to communicate across messengers in such a way that only the own messenger receives personal data. For example, if you want to send a message to a Signal user as a WhatsApp user, then the access permission remains with WhatsApp.
Basic framework to be in place by December
The DMA is far from finished let alone ratified. However, a first step has already been taken in agreeing on a common line. Accordingly, the EU Parliament wants to establish a common position before the end of December. However, it will be some time before the DMA ensures greater protection of competition and data. The aim in the coming months will be to align the ideas of the EU Parliament with those of the EU Commission and, at best, to reach a common denominator as quickly as possible.
