Europe Aims at Tech's Tower of Babel

New rules to make messaging apps communicate with one another raise privacy and security concerns

- Joshua Brustein

Any European with a Gmail account can send a message to her friends who are still using Hotmail, but she has no way to send those same people an iMessage via WhatsApp. Although this may not seem like a big deal, lawmakers in the European Union found it sufficiently concerning to address it in landmark new rules officially approved in early July. The rules will require the largest messaging services to open themselves up to rivals that want their users to be able to send messages between the platforms. They’ll cover Apple Inc.’s iMessage, as well as Meta Platforms Inc.’s WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger apps, and will likely also apply to Google Chat and Microsoft Teams, though the EU hasn’t made a formal determination on those services.

Europe has led the way in cracking down on allegedly anticompetitive behavior among the world’s largest tech companies. Its new legislation, the Digital Markets Act, or DMA, restricts certain practices that were the subject of antitrust lawsuits the EU pursued in recent years. These include Alphabet Inc.’s preinstallation of its search service on Android phones (the subject of a 2018 lawsuit), Amazon.com Inc.’s alleged practice of using private merchant data to push its own products over those from rivals (which came up in a 2019 case), and Apple’s control over which apps can be sold through its App Store (the focus of a 2020 investigation).