EU demands new rules – to the benefit of users

WhatsApp, iMessage and Facebook Messenger must open up, the EU is demanding. The operators are to work together with competing providers in the future. This should please Telegram and Signal users who could send their messages across platforms.

EU forces Messenger to cooperate more

The EU has agreed on the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which will have far-reaching consequences for large tech companies and users. One of the main goals of the DMA is to regulate market power more tightly. This also applies to the popular ones Messenger from Apple, WhatsApp and Meta (Facebook). These are to be obliged to cooperate more with one another in the future.

The EU has not yet clearly formulated what exactly the forced cooperation will look like in detail. However, it is already certain that the messenger apps should open. This should help ensure that small providers are not overwhelmed by the market power of the gatekeepers. Alternative messengers like Signal or Telegram are not mentioned by name, but should be meant.

Should there be real interoperability, as demanded by the EU, then WhatsApp & Co. will also have to in the future cross-platform news enable. A Telegram user could then simply send a message to a friend on WhatsApp. Due to the end-to-end encryption of the messenger, important technical details still stand in the way.

“Users of small or large platforms could then exchange messagessend files or make video calls via messaging apps and would have more choice,” says the EU DMA in this regard (source: European Parliament).

These are the most popular WhatsApp alternatives:

EU: Messengers face billions in fines

If the DMA is passed as planned, there will be massive penalties for disregard. Company can be fined by up to 10 percent of global annual sales get buzzed up. For repeated violations, the penalty increases to up to 20 percent. There is also the threat of a possible ban on takeovers in the event of systematic rule violations.