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.
