Keystone
A new EU law is intended to give the major messenger services more competition. But the alleged beneficiaries of the regulation are fighting back.
The Digital Markets Act (DMA) passed by the EU Parliament last week is intended to bring more competition among tech companies. Above all, the EU is targeting the large American companies, which hold a dominant position in many tech segments.
Part of the DMA is the so-called «interoperability» obligation. Services from different providers should have to work together. With regard to messenger services, this means that messages sent with iMessage can also be received with WhatsApp and vice versa.
The idea behind it is that when you change messenger services, you won’t be cut off from your old contacts. In theory, it would then be easier to turn your back on the market leader WhatsApp. This should help smaller competitors in particular. But the opposite of good is often meant well.
concerns about privacy
Because two of the apparent beneficiaries of the new EU regulation are not fans of interoperability at all. The messenger services Signal and the Swiss Threema have explicitly opposed this requirement of the DMA and justify this with concerns about the privacy of their users.
The Signal Foundation, the non-profit operator of the app, said that working with iMessage or WhatsApp would reduce privacy because companies with lower data protection standards would then have access to Signal user data. In addition, the end-to-end encryption can then no longer be implemented.
Also economically bad for smaller providers
Threema made a similar statement in April. His boss Martin Blatter led at “Network policy” also gives economic reasons for rejecting interoperability. Because if messenger services were compatible with each other, there would be no reason for users to pay a little money for alternative providers like Threema.
Fortunately for Threema and Signal, the DMA does not force them to open up to WhatsApp or other providers. Because the obligation to interoperability only applies to “gatekeeper” companies. These must have more than 45 million users in Europe and at least an annual turnover of 7.5 billion euros. At least from the latter criterion, Threema and Signal are still a long way off.
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