Antitrust will be on the minds of many in the tech industry this week, what with Google’s big trial kicking off tomorrow. That case—about the deals Google cut with handset makers to have its search preinstalled as the default—will be a real blockbuster, testing new (for the U.S.) legal theories about what constitutes an antitrust violation these days. It’s even possible that the company will be broken up. But let’s not lose sight of the smaller changes that strong competition enforcement is already putting into effect.
For example, the WhatsApp-related news service, WABetaInfo, yesterday reported that the latest beta includes a new feature called “third-party chats” that appears to be a response to the EU’s new Digital Markets Act. Meta’s WhatsApp was indeed one of the 22 popular services that the European Commission last week designated as having “gatekeeper” status under the DMA—the law puts a bunch of proactive obligations on what gatekeepers can do, to squelch antitrust violations before they happen, and interoperability with rival services is one of those obligations.
As WABetaInfo points out, WhatsApp’s new third-party-chats section isn’t ready yet, but will clearly feature in a future version of the app. End-to-end encryption is of course a concern when introducing interoperability across platforms, but I’d expect WhatsApp-to-Signal chats to appear sooner rather than later, given the fact that WhatsApp and Meta’s Facebook Messenger have been using the Signal encryption protocol for many years now.
The DMA will also have other, very visible effects. Meta and Microsoft are both gearing up to take advantage of Apple and Google being forced, as of early March next year, to let people install third-party app stores. They will also have to let developers use third-party payment platforms.
For anyone steeped in the business models that have underpinned tech’s past couple decades, the notion of opening up walled gardens may seem heretical—but it’s becoming a reality nonetheless.
As with the rest of the world, it currently feels like the industry has entered a very uncertain and transformative period. That’s partly because of AI, which has the potential to blow up everything from search to entertainment, but it’s also because regulators and lawmakers have finally caught up with the Big Tech companies whose business practices have become the status quo. There’s no doubt that antitrust enforcement will play a huge role in shaping the tech sector’s incoming incarnation.
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David Meyer
