DMA: WhatsApp encryption in danger?

Do you know the AMD or Digital Market Act? This is a European agreement that will allow SMEs in the technology sector to exist in relation to American giants from January 2023. On the program: explicit consent for targeted advertising, more choice when choosing your browser or its search engine, unrestricted “contactless” functions (possibility of using NFC capabilities in your smartphone without wondering whether it is compatible or not), but also “interoperability of the largest messaging services”.

And this is where there is a catch.

Of course, all these measures are promising at a time when we feel more and more distrust vis-à-vis GAFAM (Google, Mazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft). And then it would allow on paper to a person who has an X messaging system to send messages to a friend who only uses Y. However, this last measure raises an obvious technical problem : how to communicate WhatsApp, Viber, Snapchat, Telegram or Signal?

The DMA will impose the interoperability of WhatsApp, Messenger or iMessage. But I find it hard to believe that this can be done in practice.

Technically, it already does not seem simple… And WhatsApp is already very reluctant to move its toe cf. https://t.co/D9haQpQQyI

— Tracking Pixel (@pixeldetracking) March 29, 2022

One hell of a mess…

Even if the latter is not affected by this measure (an annual turnover of more than 7.5 billion dollars, a market capitalization of at least 75 billion dollars and 45 million users in the EU), how will others solve this interoperability problem? We are talking about an exceptional delay of 2 to 4 years, but this will inevitably have an impact on the encryption of messages, calls and attachments. Will the big ones pay for the small ones? Who will decide which protocol to use? Isn’t there a risk of seeing a weakening, even an abandonment, of encryption on instant messaging?

Another measure that starts from a good feeling, but which comes up against a reality that European decision-makers do not understand or do not want to understand… Brussels is paved with good intentions.