Interoperability of messengers is coming, soon you don't have to be locked down to any single provider. It's gonna hurt established market participants.

Messaging interoperability is the idea that instant messaging should be like email. We can each use our preferred service and app, while still being able to communicate with each other. So I might use Telegram, and you might receive it on WhatsApp.

Imagine if you couldn’t send a letter to a friend unless they were signed up to the same delivery service as you? Or if you needed multiple phones in your house to call different friends or family members. It’s unimaginable. But that’s the situation we find ourselves in. It’s a mark of how slow governments have been to take digital seriously that this situation has been allowed to arise in the first place — but it should not stand.

This is not a problem of competition. There are plenty of messaging apps out there. It’s a problem of interoperability — which is, in of itself, a problem of competition.

That’s not quite as recursive as it sounds. You have plenty of messaging clients to choose from, sure. But it’s not purely your choice, is it? If you want to talk to anyone, you’re dependent on them being happy to use your preferred client. If they’re not, you’re stuck with two choices: don’t chat with them, or install that client.

Once you get groups involved, things get more complex. If the parents of your daughters’ class all chat and share information via WhatsApp, you’re installing it or you are missing out. And there are social consequences to that.

 That’s why we need interoperability at a practical level — we should be able to use the messaging app of our choice, without having to be forced into a corporate silo against our will.

Solving this is not impossible. Even Apple – which has complete control of hardware, platform, and app – had to come up with a clever workaround to enable you to seamlessly use iMessage between iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Watch. Development of a messaging interoperability standard is tricky, but entirely possible.

It isn’t going to happen anytime soon, and even the DMA acknowledges this. But I do think it’s a worthwhile goal, and I look forward to the time when I can message five different friends without having to use five different apps.

Europe says yes to messaging interoperability

The European Union late Thursday secured agreement on the detail of a major competition reform that will see the most powerful, intermediating tech platforms subject to a set of up-front rules on how they can and cannot operate — with the threat of fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover should they breach requirements (or even 20% for repeat violations).

In three-way discussions between the European Council, Parliament and Commission, which ran for around eight hours today, it was finally agreed that the Digital Markets Act (DMA) will apply to large companies providing “core platform services” — such as social networks or search engines — that have a market capitalization of at least €75 billion or an annual turnover of €7.5 billion.

To be designated a so-called “gatekeepers,” and thus fall in scope of the DMA, companies must also have at least 45 million monthly end users in the EU and more than 10,000 annual business users.

This puts U.S. tech giants — including Apple, Google and Meta (Facebook) — clearly in scope. While some less gigantic but still large homegrown European tech platforms, such as the music streaming platform Spotify, look set to avoid being subject to the regime as it stands. (Although other European platforms may already have — or gain — the scale to fall in scope.)

SMEs are generally excluded from being designated gatekeepers as the DMA is intended to take targeted aim at Big Tech.

The regulation has been years in the making and is set to usher in a radically different ex ante regime for the most powerful tech platforms, in contrast to the after-the-fact antitrust enforcement certain giants have largely been able to shrug off to date, with no discernible impact to market share.

Frustration with flagship EU competition investigations and enforcements against tech giants like Google — and widespread concern over the need to reboot tipped digital markets and restore the possibility of vibrant competition — have been core driving forces for the bloc’s lawmakers.

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) allows new messaging services to demand interoperability (the ability to exchange messages) from the internet's largest messaging services (like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage). Interoperability is an important tool to promote competition and prevent monopolists from shutting down user-empowering innovation. But an interoperability requirement for messaging services that are end-to-end encrypted raises particularly thorny security and privacy concerns, and those concerns need to be addressed before interoperability requirements are enforced against those services. Looking into these concerns will take years—much longer than the text of the DMA currently envisions—but we have some thoughts on where to start.

The DMA’s Interoperability Rule

The DMA is a complex new law aimed at addressing the “gatekeeper” power of Big Tech firms. While some of the final details of the DMA are still in flux, negotiators from the EU Parliament and the Council of the EU have reached a "political agreement." The drafters considered several proposals relating to interoperability, including rules that would cover gatekeepers’ social networking services as well as messaging apps. But the compromise between the EU lawmakers that’s on the way to becoming law only includes an interoperability requirement for messaging apps. Specifically, the giant gatekeepers will be required to make their messaging services interoperable with other messaging apps at the request of competing developers. Negotiators have agreed to assess the feasibility of including an interoperability requirement for social networking as part of a future review of the DMA.

The DMA’s interoperability rule will apply to “number-independent” messaging services that are part of “gatekeeper” platforms, meaning platforms with the power to control other companies’ access to customers. This probably includes messaging apps from Apple, Google, Meta Platforms (e.g., Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram Direct Messenger), and Microsoft. Of these, only WhatsApp, Apple’s iMessage, and Android Messages currently offer default end-to-end encryption modes, but these services together have billions of users. These services will be required to make “end-to-end text messaging,” including various kinds of media attachments, interoperable on request by a competing service, within three month of a request. Group texts will need to be interoperable in two years, and voice and video calls in four customers, but it comes with risks.