Digital Markets Act: Commission designates six gatekeepers | Hacker News Reader

Digital Markets Act: Commission designates six gatekeepers

ec.europa.eu

88 pointsjlpcsl118 comments

I thought iMessage would totally be designated a gatekeeper status.

I guess it's still in investigation, and being fair, it's not as popular a messaging application as it is in the USA where it would absolutely needs to be forced to open up. Just not as bad an issue in Europe I guess.

Yeah, iMessage just... didn't really take off here. In Europe, WhatsApp holds a much greater market share in the West, while the further east you go, Telegram becomes the more dominant means of communication.

It's probably in part because of the fact that iOS isn't as big in Europe; outside of the Netherlands (where iOS controls about 70% of the smartphone market) it tends to be pretty equal in market share with Android and there's of course no iMessage on Android. People want to talk to each other, share photos and WhatsApp was cross-platform with Android basically from the start.

Telegram is a bit of a late arrival comparatively, and I couldn't tell you why it's big in East Europe, it just... is. Probably something to do with the remaining Russian influence in those countries?

It makes total sense why WhatsApp is designated a gatekeeper but iMessage isn't.

Honestly, I have experience with both and Telegram is far superior. Yes, it was created by "Russian Zuck", and it was also blocked in Russia for a long time. It is argued, if FSB has keys to decrypt Telegram. I personally did not see evidence to that. Some of the options widely used in the EE: - by default chats are not e2e but there is a quite secret option. - built-in proxy support to add another encryption layer and avoid blockings. - there are news channels which is a very convenient way of getting and sharing content. Yes, WhatsApp is getting these now. There is a ton of other features which are only now coming to WhatsApp, which has e2e by default for every chat. On the other hand, lately, I feel that Telegram is going to also have-it-all which is annoying. Even stories now

Many of my friends in Germany have Telegram as well and I think that it’s mainly because it has by far the best multi device (esp. Desktop / Notebook) UX. Switching devices with Telegram and using it on several devices concurrently has always been super easy.

It’s because iMessage is Apple only. Europe is 90% Android while the US is 50/50.

It's still not clear why an app that can be used by at most 50% of people is dominant.

IANAL and this isn't an argument of whats legally a monopoly in the US, but I think "dominant" or "not dominant" across the entire population is an insufficient way to look at market power when network effects are involved. As an example, in the US its about 50/50 but Gen Z is 87/13 towards iPhone and there switching to Android presents a much much higher cost than a 50/50 or less scenario. Apple has considerable market power over a large slice of the population that network tightly together. You also see incidental enforcement of social stratification where wealthier users are more likely to use iPhone.

I think those are things that someone could be legitimately concerned about from a competition standpoint without considering iMessage to be dominant across the entire market.

I just pretend that rather than Tim Cook's face telling us that if we want to communicate with grandma we need to buy her an iphone, it's AT&T / Ma Bell telling us that.

> Just not as bad an issue in Europe I guess.

The iMessage dominance is a uniquely American issue. In the most of the world people don't use it. Instead, multiplatform apps are the norm. It's not realistic to expect that most of the people around you will have an iPhone to use iMessage because iPhones are just too expensive to justify the purchase when you can get away with a much cheaper android device.

However, FaceTime is often used when possible.

Also, ?reverse? network effect. Even if i message someone whom I know they have an iPhone I'll use WhatsApp because I want to have all my conversations in the same place.

The only time i explicitly use iMessage is when I want to send a photo as unaltered as possible - wapp recompresses them for size.

> The only time i explicitly use iMessage is when I want to send a photo as unaltered as possible - wapp recompresses them for size.

Are you sure about this? I usually send images/videos via WhatsApp because, AFAICT, they are sent unchanged (unlike Facebook messenger, for example), and know multiple people who do the same thing.

I never checked the file hashes, though.

Afaik there's a mysterious 'send as file' in WhatsApp that I haven't mastered that will indeed send the files unmodified, but if you just send from your gallery they will recompress.

I generally don't care about my photos THAT much to figure out how to send them completely unmodified.

Yeah, if US would care about free market, iMessage would be an issue.

But in EU it doesn't really (yet) have such a big market share.

Although I do hope they conclude that iMessage needs to be an interoperable service - basic human communication services shouldn't be constrainted to a single electronics device brand.

They did name FB Messenger and WhatsApp so it sounds correct for the EU.

it already is interoperable as you can receive and send plain old sms messages without an issue.

You are just saying that it's interoperable as long as you use another service where it is not supported.

When I open iMessage and send a message to somebody using an Android phone, they receive it. When they reply, I see it in iMessage. When I react to something, the reaction is transliterated into text and sent via SMS. When I send an image, it is sent via MMS. It’s fair to say that there’s interoperability.

Yeah, that's not interoperability. The interoperable service here is SMS.

You also conveniently leave out just how much Apple degrades experience in those cases.

It’s interoperability. I can send/receive messages to/from a completely different system.

You might not like how they’ve implemented it, but it is interoperable.

How about you read the definition the EC uses for interoperability and stop bsing here?

> How about you read the definition the EC uses for interoperability

much clearer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interoperability

> Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems.

yeah, that's supported across the world via SMS. what exactly is the problem here?

I did. Why don’t you explain why you think what iMessage does is not sufficient according to their definition?

what other service?

you go to your messaging app that comes pre-installed on your phone and you send a text message. the other person, no matter the device, will receive it.

looks interoperable to me.

May not have met the number of users requirement. I wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t 45 million _active_ users in the EU; I’m pretty deep into the Apple ecosystem, but virtually never use it. WhatsApp, and to some extent Telegram, have largely won that race in Europe.

I'd guess that if iMessage had a market share even remotely close to that of the US, it'd be a much bigger issue and would definitely qualify. Still, here it really isn't, no one actively uses it (if they do, it's probably because what they really wanted to do was send an SMS because they were unsure if the person had WhatsApp or something, and iMessage converted it)

Why does it need to be forced to open up?

Because iMessage is a big reason people do not switch from iPhone to an Android phone in the US, so if Apple gets more market share in Europe and everyone start using iMessage, it would be reasonable to think this would start affecting competition as people become "locked in" due to the messaging of one over another platform.

But, like I said, it's not a big of a deal in Europe where most people use whatsapp or facebook messenger over native messaging. At least that's what Apple has claimed. Probably because iMessage is not fully functional on android and so people just can't communicate with others effectively.

But in the USA, everyone has iPhones, so everyone uses iMessage. The same messaging platforms exist in the USA as in Europe; but it doesn't matter, it's all about where your friends/family are. If everyone is on iMessage then you gotta be on iMessage and if the only way of getting iMessage (effectively) is having an iPhone then you just have to have an iPhone.

This is now entering personal experience territory but I know plenty of Americans who have android phones and are thinking of getting an iPhone because of iMessage, particularly now that the iPhones are going to come with usb-c (thanks, Europe). On the other hand, I know people who have iPhones and want to switch to android but are held back due to everyone they know using iMessage.

I mean, it's possible to survive without it, sure. But it's a significant boulder on the road of migration. So that's why I think it should be open up.

Thanks that's helpful context. But if you want to switch from iPhone (thanks, US) to Android, what's the actual barrier? Do you lose all the photos/videos sent to you on iMessage?

I think for most people its more about the network effects. Once you switch any iMessage groups you are in get degraded to MMS which means you'll probably just get dropped from the group so that the iPhone users can keep using read receipts/typing indicators, send higher quality media, and get lower latency/higher reliability chat.

Even for one-on-one conversations you and the other participant immediately lose a lot of QoL features that you took for granted.

Obviously there are crossplatform apps that offer those features but now the friction of switching to Android includes trying to convince every iPhone user you interact with or will interact with to download another app and set up an account or both of you have to deal with a pretty miserable chat experience.

Its definitely not the end of the world but if your goal is to promote competition then lowering switching friction has to be a big part of that.

iMessage support for android is limited.

The most evident is that if you're running iMessage on Android your messages will show on an iPhone as a green bubble (as opposed to a blue one if you were using an iPhone). This might not seem like a great a deal, but it is, specially in young people... there is a lot of cultural baggage against "green bubble". You might get bullied in school for it. Apple basically "brands you" to set you apart.

There's also limited reactions (when you "heart" or "thumbs up" a message) and some types of messages are just not supported in the android version of the app.

So, in reality, apple kind of goes out of its way to make the app just not fully compatible in android precisely because they want people to feel left out if they're not using an iPhone.

I think it's important to think of this issue from the perspective of a first-time phone buyer. Which at this point might be a 10-12yo, if all their friends are texting on iMessage and you're the only one that's different... well, I think a lot of us know that's not a feeling you necessarily will enjoy.

I think the barrier would be loss of access to friends and family. Especially group chats. From inertia, conversations would continue on iMessage without the person who switched.

I would like to see iMessage on other platforms, but I don't think I'd want the protocol itself opened up. That would lead to much more spam (I saw this starting to ramp up on google chat before they cut off XMPP).

Maybe as a work around one of the EU commissioners can bug your family and friends to include you in their group chats. Access to group chats have recently been added to the list of inalienable rights.

Famously the EU has never before addressed issues that aren't violations of inalienable rights

This is my instinct too. If the only thing keeping the family together is regulations, then what does that mean? Wouldn't they just all switch to WhatsApp or Signal?

https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...

It is a Google talking point. See every time RCS is mentioned, and it even came up at I/O.

> Following their designation, gatekeepers now have six months to comply with the full list of do's and don'ts under the DMA, offering more choice and more freedom to end users and business users of the gatekeepers' services.

6 months until sideloading on iOS?

Yes, looking forward to it! This is the only thing that's prevented me from switching from Android to iOS.

The word on the street is that Apple will do it only in EU and will be serious about enforcing it. According to the rumours, Apple will check against location and verified EU iCloud account before allowing side loading.

>> Apple will check against location and verified EU iCloud account before allowing side loading.

I doubt this would be compliant. For example, Northern Irish users will be using a UK iCloud account due to their address of residence. However they are/can be EU citizens despite the UK no longer being within the EU. Unless DMA applies to residents rather than citizens of course.

This is a market, not immigration/border-security law. So might not apply in the occupied parts of Ireland.

You can use an Apple device without iCloud right? How would that work? They do know in which region the device was sold though.

I assume they have mistaken “iCloud account” for “Apple ID with associated payment method”. In order to use the App Store, you need payment details with a billing address. Apple uses this billing address to decide which region your Apple ID is in for the purposes of licensing, region locking, etc. If they were going to distinguish between EU and non-EU accounts, they would use this.

Also, in order to change regions, not only do you need to add a new payment method with a verified payment address in the new region, you also need to cancel all in-app subscriptions and then resubscribe after you have changed region. Assuming the app and subscription is available in the new region, of course.

I’m skeptical they’ll do this though. Allowing side loading is a sufficiently large change in strategy that it doesn’t really make much difference to Apple if they allow the EU to do it vs the whole world.

You can use Macs without iCloud, not iDevices. On Macs you can already install whatever you like.

sebazzz was correct, and you are incorrect. You don't need to sign in to iCloud on an iOS device. My iPhone does not use iCloud.

It appears so. TIL.

What does this mean for Youtube? For Whatsapp and iOS, the implications are known (other app stores and browsers, allowing interop between Whatsapp and other messengers, etc), but what will Youtube have to do to comply with the DMA?

Example from the "Do"s of the DMA

> provide companies advertising on their platform with the tools and information necessary for advertisers and publishers to carry out their own independent verification of their advertisements hosted by the gatekeeper

It's about preventing abusive behavior towards creators/marketers on the platform, not just about users.

I know the intentions are positive here, but I can't help feeling like this is going to have unintended consequences that make services worse for the majority of us who do not live in the EU, like GDPR did.

We have a regulatory body that doesn't prioritize standardizing on a single type of electrical plug now driving digital standards for companies that operate globally.

>> unintended consequences that make services worse for the majority of us who do not live in the EU, like GDPR did.

Can you give an example? Things like Google Takeout and other services allow you to download all your data are a direct consequence of GDPR. Seems like a huge win to me. If your complaint is “cookie banners” your complaint if with website owners rather than any legislation.

The complaint is cookie banners. They litter the Web now as a direct result of GDPR. Website owners didn't just start obscuring their sites because it's fun. They make the Web worse for everyone in the world.

Yes, I know that technically such banners are not required under GDPR. I also know that even the webmasters at The European Commission (see the linked ec.europa.eu site) add cookie banners 7 years after the law was passed. It is not reasonable to expect other organizations to interpret the law more effectively than the EU itself.

Cookie banners existed long before the GDPR, due to the ePrivacy Directive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPrivacy_Directive

And the EU is actively working on creating a new ePrivacy Regulation [0] that would explicitly tackle the explosion of cookie banners.

> Simpler rules on cookies: the cookie provision, which has resulted in an overload of consent requests for internet users, will be streamlined. The new rule will be more user-friendly as browser settings will provide an easy way to accept or refuse tracking cookies and other identifiers. The proposal also clarifies that no consent is needed for non-privacy intrusive cookies that improve internet experience, such as cookies to remember shopping-cart history or to count the number of website visitors.

[0]: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eprivacy-r...

The assertion that the proliferation of cookie banners dates to 2002 does not pass the smell test. It was GDPR.

What smell test? I very much remember cookie banners being a problem way before the GDPR and so does the rest of the web:

(2012) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19505835

(2013) https://econsultancy.com/17-useful-examples-of-eu-cookie-law...

(2015) https://superuser.com/questions/725312/disable-all-cookie-wa...

(2013) https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/40687/we-use-cookies-...

I must have been blind to the banners for a number of years :-). In any case, the larger point stands: the EU created the cookie banner mess that makes the Web worse for everybody, whether or not we are EU citizens. It seems the only debate is whether they have dawdled 14 years before attempting to address the issue or "only" 5 years.

It was the 2009 amendment of the ePrivacy Directive which introduced cookie consent, as noted in the Wikipedia article.

Takeout predates the GDPR by years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Takeout

0 European companies named.

Can you think of any that actually would have applied under these rules? These markets are basically entirely dominated by American companies.

Spotify arguably would have qualified if they had included an "online music service" category alongside "online video service" (where YouTube was designated). The fact that this was left out is interesting.

Spotify is _way_ below the minimum market cap (75bn, I think).

True. Including market cap in the definition is another oddity in this - why not just look at the size of the active user base?

Specifically so that EU companies like Spotify wouldn't be included.

(I am guessing there is a specific carve-out in the law that exempts Deutsche Telekom, which is bigger than $75b, and Vodafone, which is close.)

DT is primarily a telecom, so already subject to a lot of regulation about carriage and so on. Not sure it would do anything if they were included; it’s not like they’re saying (or could say) “yeah, you can’t phone people who use O2 with this phone”.

IMO the most surprising omission is Telegram (presumably due to the market cap thing). I would have thought they’d be quite keen to bring _that_ into the net.

Looks like Telegram is private (so harder for observers to accurately value) and likely still would be well under the size cap (support for the notion that the size cap is there to exclude EU companies).

Dubai isn't exactly in the EU...

Huh, I thought they were based in Europe, but they now say that is dated: "The Telegram team had to leave Russia due to local IT regulations and has tried a number of locations as its base, including Berlin, London and Singapore."

Not for the Digital Markets Act, but the German clothing company Zalando is iirc large enough to qualify under the stipulations of the Digital Services Act (which is more focused on digital moderation if I'm not mistaken, rather than anti-monopolist behavior).

Last I checked, Zalando sued the CJEU because they were unhappy with the designation.

Zalando objects that for everybody else users were counted, while for them it was visitors (a much looser association, they argue). The decision will sharpen DSA's profile, one way or the other.

That's basically what I'm saying. We have nothing. It's shameful.

No, it is shameful that US allows such huge monopolies in the first place. These should not exist at all and should be broken up before becoming so huge.

Umm none of these companies are monopolies. For everyone in the list there is another option

Europe just doesn't have any companies at all

10 of the world's largest 50 companies by revenue are European.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...

Interesting list. The only European companies I recognize are car companies; Volkswagen, Fiat Chrysler, and Mercedes-Benz. The rest are all energy or mining companies, with the exception of Schwarz Gruppe which is apparently a retail chain? It's also surprising how many of the American companies are healthcare-related, and how the relative ordering changes to favor tech and oil companies when you sort by profit instead of revenue.

This list actually surprised me. The European companies on the list fall into 3 categories: commodities (e.g. petroleum or mining), utilities, and automakers.

> For everyone in the list there is another option

Yep. WhatsApp and FB Messenger. Two options. Except that they seem to be owned by the same company.

Signal, iMessage, Telegram, Line, WeChat, Element, SMS ...the list goes on n on

Yeah and if you put it that way Brave or Opera are viable browser alternatives that should be regulated :)

Only ubiquitous thing in that list is SMS. Which is crap and that's why no one uses it any more, and no one ever liked to use it.

They are viable options. I dont know about regulated, but them not being used is their problem. IE6 was king and then phoenix unseated them, followed by firefox. So people have options, them not using the other option is their issue

none of these are options when the only way to talk to my landlord or my customer is whatsapp.

Europe's definition of monopoly is one that actually makes sense, unlike the US's bafflingly stupid version. You do not need over 50% to be a monopoly.

More like, no other financial and investment markets are as liquid and stable as America’s, which attracts the world’s innovators and investors. The US should not replicate the failure and incompetence at the helm of the EU and other major bureaucracies.

> The US should not replicate the failure and incompetence at the helm of the EU and other major bureaucracies.

Yeah, protecting consumers and allowing fair competition, what a shame.

I like that entirely vibes-based reddit discourse has made its way onto this platform.

Fair competition from who? Certainly not the EU.

You missed the point. It doesn't matter where competition comes from, this whole campaign is about loosening the grip a handful of companies ("gatekeepers") have over de facto monopolies.

In short, this would benefit smaller players everywhere.

Mercedes and BMW with their car software?

The EU is in a bind. Long ago it has outsourced its entire digital infrastructure to the US (opting to finesse internal combustion engines instead).

Nowadays the result is the complete dependence in what is increasingly an existential piece of technology on the unregulated cowboy regime that is charitably termed "big tech".

This rubs alot of people wrong in terms, e.g., of data privacy practices and olipolistic market power, hence these unprecedented regulations and measures.

Whether something meaningful will be achieved is questionable, but anybody trying to dismiss these signals doesn't understand the stresses that are building up in the digital domain.

i don't think that is relevant. every other country in the world except china and maybe russia has the same problem. the EU is the only one at least to be able to do something about it, and in the long term that will help other countries as well (as they now can just demand the same openness, which will allow local alternatives to at least have a chance)

noscript/basic (x)html link?

Only this PDF: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/docume...

The article links to this print-friendly PDF:

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/docume...

Also, it being the official European Commission site, they comply properly with the GDPR, and if you do view the webpage with JavaScript enabled and choose only essential cookies, they do respect that correctly.

Well, only with the letter, not the spirit. Otherwise they would only use essential cookies and there would be no need for the popup.

The spirit too... They use Matomo and collect internal analytics only, there are no third-party trackers on these sites...

GDPR with javascript-ed web, are you serious?

If true, the GDPR needs some fixes...

What do you believe are some inherent incompatibilities between JavaScript and the GDPR?

This is obviously a troll.

Whatever, we'll have a look at this GDPR and the ones which bear its responsability with my lawyers.

>[...]Alphabet, Microsoft and Samsung provided sufficiently justified arguments showing that these services do not qualify as gateways for the respective core platform services.

The mental gymnastics, corporate/lawyer double speak and lobbying efforts in those argumentations must have been absolutely insane.

That's only for Gmail, outlook.com, and samsung browser. It is possible to argue that these are not gateways without mental gymnastics.

It is fairly easy to migrate out of Gmail and outlook to another email provider. Not self host, but that's a different issue.

Samsung browser... Don't know any sites which only work in Samsung browser.

Yes and no. Isn’t there an argument that Gmail and Outlook.com (combined with Microsoft 365/Exchange Online), while superficially interoperable, have enough market share that their actions make running other mail providers very difficult in practice?

> Isn’t there an argument that Gmail and Outlook.com (combined with Microsoft 365/Exchange Online), while superficially interoperable, have enough market share that their actions make running other mail providers very difficult in practice?

Yes, there is an argument to be made for that. I personally agree with that viewpoint. But that doesn’t mean arguing against it is “mental gymnastics”. It’s possible for reasonable people to disagree about things.

Indeed. I hope the EU revisits this soon.

The "as gateways for the respective core platform services" is the important part here.

The linked page states in its very first sentence:

> The European Commission has today designated, for the first time, six gatekeepers - Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft - under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

That was about Gmail and Outlook. One obvious distinction is that they're already federated services that interoperate with a massive ecosystem of third parties, so there's not much need for regulation to force that interoperability.

Except for the problems self-hosters have with Gmail and Outlook silently rejecting their emails. They are not fully interoperable.

It's actually the first time I hear of "Samsung Internet Browser".

It's just a skin of Chromium that Samsung phones use as a default browser.

Samsung's Browser will very likely overtake Firefox in share this year.

It's just Chromium, but it's superior in performance and features IMO to Chrome itself.

An interesting take. I’m not a Samsung user, but these days I get enough bug reports about issues specific to Samsung browser that I had to buy a device just to reproduce the random weird stuff that happens. The latest one had to do with Samsung browsers’ dark mode which has some strange algorithm to make every website dark.

I understand why - quite important on Samsungs to use dark mode and not just at night, as their OLED screens draw a less power displaying dark colours, giving improved battery life

The fact it has a proper dark mode that doesn't require sites to support it is one of it's best features IMO. It is a lifesaver when trying to get a small child to sleep.

I, too, like dark mode. But, I've found several instances that required the site to make modifications to support dark mode. Most recent example was a QR code rendered as <svg> with a transparent background. The parent container had a white background. Samsung made the parent background black but didn't invert the QR code color. So as a result the QR code was unusable.

These companies didn't even exist 100 years ago and most of the success they have had, are big innovations in their respective areas in last 20 years. Yet now they are designated as some sort of immortal "gatekeepers".

They're not designated as "immortal" gatekeepers. The commission can revise the list at any time, as market conditions change.

Every monopolist was once not a monopolist. Every monopolist came into existence at some point in the past and did not exist before then. So what? Should we abolish all antitrust law for this reason? It's a very strange criticism.

So? They're gatekeepers today.

> Under the DMA, the European Commission can designate digital platforms as ‘gatekeepers' if they provide an important gateway between businesses and consumers in relation to core platform services.

Do you contest this designation?

You make it sound like being a gatekeeper is a thing of honor, but in this context being a gatekeeper means regulation, but not protection.

Hundred years is a too-big number!

Microsoft and Apple are in their late 40s, Amazon and Google are in their 20s, Facebook is 19 and ByteDance is a teenager with 11 years old, yet managed to be classified as gatekeepers.

I think no other company, with a young age, in any other domain but tech could ever qualify as a gatekeeper

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