Apple and Microsoft
No strict EU rules for iMessage and Bing
The EU Commission has closed investigations into certain Apple and Microsoft services. photo
© Fabian Sommer/dpa
The EU Commission is trying to limit the market power of online giants with strict rules. However, exceptions will now apply to the services of two of them.
The EU Commission has been trying to limit the market power of tech giants for a long time. This also includes Amazon and Meta (the company behind Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram). They are also referred to as “gatekeepers” – this means that the dominant Internet companies act as intermediaries between a large number of providers and users. A number of prohibitions and requirements from the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) apply to them in the EU.
Violations of the rules result in heavy fines
One of the rules is that large chat services must open themselves up to interacting with smaller messaging providers. At Meta, two offers fall under the DMA rules: WhatsApp and Messenger. The requirement for group chats will only come in the coming years. Violations can result in heavy fines and, in exceptional cases, even separation.
The requirement to open up messaging services has been highly controversial in recent years. Most services work with so-called end-to-end encryption. This means that messages and files sent are only displayed in plain text on the devices of the users involved – but are not readable by the provider. The services sometimes warned that an opening could undermine protective mechanisms.
Apple also generally only makes iMessage available on the company’s devices – and argues with data protection, among other things. Messages sent via iMessage have blue speech bubbles in the app. Everything that comes from outside is green – and cannot be part of group chats, for example. Especially in the USA, where iPhones are even more widespread than in Europe, Apple’s Android competitors see this as a competitive factor.
Consumers should have freedom of choice
In the USA, the iPhone company recently stopped Beeper’s attempts to indirectly send messages from smartphones with the Google Android system to iMessage. At the same time, Apple announced that it would also support the RCS SMS successor standard in its messaging app in the future – even if the messages sent with it will remain green.
The DMA is intended to limit the market power of the Internet giants, ensure fairer competition and give consumers more freedom of choice when it comes to online offers. Companies fall under the DMA if they have annual sales of at least 7.5 billion euros or an average market capitalization of at least 75 billion euros. They must also operate a so-called central platform service with at least 45 million active users in the EU and 10,000 active commercial users per month.