The upheaval in the Internet that is currently emerging can be best explained using Whatsapp as an example. Many people worry about the lax handling of their data with the messenger, which belongs to the social media empire Meta. Use anyway 81 percent of Germans aged 14 and over Whatsapp. This is precisely why hardly anyone can bypass the app – unless they want to tell friends and relatives that they have switched to another messenger due to data protection concerns and that they can only be reached if they join in.
This is called the “network effect”: Services grow even further just because they are widespread – and then remain large because users feel, to a certain extent, locked in. Politicians, especially from the SPD, have been promoting an antidote for years that could soon become law.
Digital services should be obliged to be interoperable. This means that they have to connect with each other so that their granddaughter, who has switched to a different messenger such as Signal, can send messages to her grandpa, which he then receives on Whatsapp. In a survey by the Federal Association of Consumer Organizations, a third of those questioned stated that they would change their main messenger if they could use it to reach all of their contacts.
Cross connections between the microcosms should be created
The EU plans to anchor a corresponding requirement in the law for digital markets. The large digital platforms should open up technically so that it is possible for smaller providers to “interconnect” with them. That is what it says in the motion on which the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection has agreed. The plenary session is due to approve it next Wednesday, after which the draft will be discussed with the Commission and the Member States.
We’re not just talking about messengers, but also about social networks. So it could be that, in the future, Twitter users, for example, will also be able to post a post on Facebook using a corresponding button. The obligation to interoperability would only affect the large providers. These so-called gatekeepers have so far benefited from the network effects. They would have to open themselves and their services to cross-connections into other digital microcosms. What effects this has on users should be an exciting field of research when it comes to that.
Small providers are not forced to interoperate in order not to overwhelm them. First of all, they would have to rebuild their services and probably also expand them in order to be able to open channels to larger, technically more complex platforms in a meaningful way. In practice this could get complicated. What would be wanted would be nothing less than uniform standards for communication in the social web, such as those for online banking, e-mails and traditional telephony. However, whether these standards really create more competition or rather prevent innovation is an open question.
EU Commission Vice-President Margrethe Vestager warned in March: “If we now stipulate that all messengers must be compatible, this could lead to us getting a kind of SMS back.” Special functions such as displaying emojis during video calls or particularly good transmission quality would either have to become a universal standard – or remain limited to users who communicate with each other within the same service. In this case, communication between the services would run the risk of establishing a lowest common denominator as the standard.
“Only as fast as the slowest participant”
Such fears can also be heard from the industry. You are in an interim report by the Federal Cartel Office, which is currently investigating the market for messenger and video telephony. It is primarily about interoperability. Most of the companies surveyed reject such a legal obligation. According to the report, a “leading video conference provider” fears that the industry can “only move forward as the slowest participant can keep up”. This also means, of course, that the major providers want to keep their technical lead and the quasi-monopoly created by network effects, of course. But also smaller services fear having to give up their specialization in favor of possible standards.
The Swiss messenger Threema, for example, writes on SZ request: If in future the users of all messengers would communicate on the same data protection level, no one would have to download an app like Threema that attaches particular importance to data protection. Other providers warn against the massive exchange of so-called metadata (for example: who is communicating with whom?) And identifiers (who is who?) In an overarching communication network of interoperable services. After all, the report by the Federal Cartel Office states that interoperability is “not outright rejected” by the industry.
Secure encryption should continue to be possible
But the real work would still have to be done if the EU were to really tell gatekeepers to open up, which is very likely. Then the search for common standards would begin, between the Scylla of the lowest common denominator and the Charybdis of functional scopes that some providers overstrain and therefore leave out. The first technical proposals are already available, such as how tap-proof end-to-end encryption could also be implemented between different messengers.
The areas that, according to the proposal from the parliamentary committee, are to be made interoperable are “functions such as text, video, language and image” in messengers and “posts, likes and comments” in social media. The paper remains vague about how this standard-setting is to be done. For Susanne Blohm from the Federal Association of Consumer Organizations, this would be the decisive point: Who decides what the universal chat message, the universal video call, the cross-platform super-like should look like? There is, she says, “the risk that the design is in the hands of the powerful companies, who are then the ones who also implement it technically”. In the worst case, every messenger would at some point be as data-hungry as Whatsapp is today.