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Chat among yourselves: New EU law may force the big IM platforms to open up

Send an iMessage to Facebook, and we'll talk

The European Parliament's new Digital Markets Act, adopted as a draft law this week, could compel big platforms owned by large firms including Apple, Google, and Facebook to make their tech interoperable.

Among other things, this might mean forcing the tech vendors' messaging apps to allow communication with other services.

If the EU deems a company to be what it calls a "gatekeeper", it could impose "structural or behavioural remedies" – compelling the largest outfits to allow interoperability, or imposing fines. The Act would also restrict what companies could do with personal data – not the first time it's tried.

While the legislation carefully phrases the characteristics that make a company a gatekeeper in terms of its operations inside the EU, the fines are assessed against global revenue. It applies to companies that provide a "core platform service" in at least three EU nations, with more than 45 million monthly users and 10,000 business users. In money terms, it's talking about €8bn a month inside the union, and a market cap of 10 times that.

A potential get-out is that it applies to "number-independent interpersonal communication services" – so services that identify you by your phone number rather than an account, such as Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, and the like, might be able to dodge the new rules, which won't come into force for a year or two.

As we pointed out a week ago, services already exist that can talk to most vendors' proprietary offerings. Nothing technical prevents this and many of the services talked to one another in the past.

For example, Apple's iMessage originally used AOL's OSCAR protocol, and AOL allowed authentication using Gmail credentials. Google's Chat, Talk, and Hangouts, and Facebook Messenger, all used the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol or XMPP – to and from which Skype offered a gateway.

As far as the phone number-based systems go, there's also an existing standard for internet-based SMS – not that anybody cares. ®

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