The EU governing bodies are supposedly going after the big tech companies with their newest law, known as Digital Markets Act or DMA. The newly formed law targets large tech companies, defined as having a market capitalization of more than €75 billion. Moreover, a company with a user base of more than 45 million would be forced to create products that can operate with smaller platforms.
Meanwhile, if we take messaging apps into consideration, for instance, WhatsApp, the law will result in the encrypted messaging service working along with less secure messaging services like SMS. According to many security experts, the interflow of encrypted messaging services with less secure messaging services like SMS would compromise the security factor.
DMA and tech giants
However, the primary focus of the EU’s DMA is the big tech companies like WhatsApp. Moreover, dubbed “Gatekeepers” owing to their larger user base and revenue generation. At the same time, these gatekeepers indeed hold dominance against their smaller competitors, and that is what EU’s new law DMA aims to eliminate. The EU regulators are also hoping for smaller players in the market to compete with their products, even operate their products at the same level, which would quickly turn into allowing users to install third-party apps on their iPhones.
However, big tech companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook simply can’t operate on the same level with their unique and different products. With each company taking a unique approach to product design, EU’s DMA seems to be in a pickle. At the same time, the real problem from DMA is for companies like WhatsApp, which uses end-to-end encryption. WhatsApp’s protocol would make it complex, if not impossible, to bring smaller players with their different apps on board. If that’s not enough, the move EU’s DMA is suggesting would contribute to compromising the security of these apps, particularly in WhatsApp’s scenario.
With that, we come to the end of this article; meanwhile, as there are still developments in the DMA scene, we’ll make sure to post more stories in the coming days.
