The shadow of the Digital Market Act (DMA) has been looming over GAFAM for more than a year. This new regulation, which aims to regulate the dominant position of large technology companies, which the European Union calls “gatekeepers”, will come into force on March 7, with all its restrictions. Among these, we especially see the interoperability of messaging. WhatsApp, which took over the watchman label, is already preparing for its fateful date.
But despite the imminent implementation of DMA, some messaging services were still in the dark. iMessage is a thorny issue for the EU; While the practice is particularly popular in the United States, it is much less popular in the Old Continent. Last December, it appeared that the Commission was in favor of removing the gatekeeper concept for iMessage. According to Bloomberg, the decision is now official.
iMessage won’t need to be rolled out to other messaging services in Europe
The European Commission has therefore made its final decision: iMessage does not have a large enough user base in Europe to be subject to DMA. Let’s remember that the threshold was set at 45 million users. Apple has been struggling since last year to make it clear that iMessage has not reached that threshold in Europe. The latter therefore allowed the Commission to approve this claim.
Therefore, unlike WhatsApp, there is no interoperability for iMessage in Europe. This is good news for Apple, which has already had to make some concessions on the app store by accepting the arrival of competition on iOS. Additionally, the European Commission’s latest decision also concerns Bing. Microsoft’s search engine is also escaping DMA, which will allow it to quietly advance its AI obsession.
Source : Bloomberg
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