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EU Plans To Change The Whole Messaging Industry

62e254b543914
Luka Lekveishvili
28.07.22 13:18
431
EU rules to make all messaging applications universal so that you would be able to send messages across platforms.

EU approved the regulations in early July, targeting big tech companies against using their messaging applications to “lock their users” within their platforms. Policymakers argue that just like you can send emails from Gmail to Yahoo, the same is possible and desirable for instant messages. As they say, companies such as Apple and Meta use their communication services to keep their users on their platform, violating antitrust laws.

Despite much criticism, lawmakers argue that the regulations leave enough time for companies to figure out the strategy and start developing the necessary technologies. The law requires the ability for users to send basic messages across platforms by 2024, make groups interoperable two years later, and have a voice and video calls two more years later.

To say that this announcement was negatively perceived is an understatement. Many company CEOs and people in tech have expressed their opinion and reactions. Wired said the idea was “doomed to fail”. The very first concern is security. Many different platforms use different encryption algorithms if any at all, and all of them have different policies about security and privacy. Allowing such interoperability will require creating one standardised encryption method, which will prove very difficult for everybody to agree on, or will require applications to loosen their methods when communicating to other platforms.

Signal’s CEO said in a statement that connecting with iMessage and WhatsApp “would ultimately degrade the privacy of Signal and its users” by opening up the people’s data to be “used or sold in ways not aligned with Signal’s mission”. Companies such as Meta track your IP address and monitor the content shared, which Signal, for example, will not allow.

The Stanford Internet Observatory’s Alex Stamos, a former Meta executive, told the Verge that “writing the law to say, ‘You should allow for total interoperability without creating any privacy or security risks’ is like just ordering doctors to cure cancer.”

The second issue is that all platforms are unique in their own way. Fundamentally, they all allow us to communicate with each other, but the reason we download different applications and not use just one is that they provide different features. Companies develop and innovate these features in their own way and strategy for their target consumers. Companies would have to work their way around this issue by either all integrating the same functionalities or giving them up altogether. Some applications send compressed image and video files and some keep the quality uncompressed. Applications provide message reactions, replies and forwarding in a different way as well.

While we do see email providers working perfectly when sending emails universally, it became hard to differentiate the services they provide. We have seen very little change in the email format and have had nearly no innovation for years. Providers can only try to make themselves unique by filtering and organizing the mail. Making messaging industry universal can prove to discourage innovation just like it did with email. SMS was the old universal messaging service that the telephone service providers used. It is still functional but developers are moving on from using it, as it only allows the use of just the basics. Other than that, spammers have found a way to exploit these standardised systems and the same could be possible for online messaging.

“Regulators may have jumped at messaging as the first case because they find it easy to imagine,” says Cory Doctorow, an author and a prominent activist on digital rights issues.“They can’t even imagine what interoperable social media would be like.”

In theory, universal messaging sounds good, the perfect application that everybody could use, that will satisfy everybody, be secure and provide all the features. However, such a projection is unrealistic. Most likely companies will not develop this universal application but intergrade a very basic messaging service for different platforms. It is still debatable if it will even benefit smaller companies in competing against the giants at all, which the EU is trying to accomplish.