The Digital Markets Act will not address tech monopolies according to experts

Apple and the European Commission: The Gateway to Apple’s DMA-Controlled App Store Dominance (with an App Store Dedicated to Alphabet)

Apple’s App Store platform was one of the biggest targets for the DMA, having come under fire over the years for banning alternative payment methods, as well as taking up to 30 percent of revenue from app developers. The challenge of operating five separate app stores appeared to be a bad-faith attempt to evade compliance by imposing artificial distinctions on what is clearly a unified service.

The European Commission presumes that a platform is a roadblock if it fails to meet two conditions. It must have an average market cap of at least 75 billion in the last fiscal year, and provide its core platform for at least three EU member states. Second, it must operate a core platform with at least 45 million monthly active users in the EU and more than 10,000 yearly active EU business users in each of the last three fiscal years.

The commission identified specific services for each of the designated gatekeepers that it believes are subject to DMA rules. Gatekeepers can be fined between 10 and 20 percent of global revenue for failing to comply with the rules.

Alphabet has a sprawling empire, stretching from a dominant search engine to a major web browser and popular mobile operating system, with many services interlinked to augment their power. That’s given it the widest range of covered services under the DMA:

The company changed in January and March affecting everything from data sharing to search results for EU users. The highlights include a lot.

Smaller, specialized search platforms were upset by the proposed changes. Online reviews platform Yelp recently claimed the search changes not only “violate the DMA’s prohibition against self-preferencing, they actually increase the rate at which users will remain within Google’s walled garden.” Megan Gray, former counsel for rival search engine DuckDuckGo, has questioned the entire concept of choice screens as an effective vehicle for promoting competition. And Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, whose company is suing Google for antitrust violations in the US, has objected strenuously to its Android payment framework. We probably haven’t seen the end of questions aboutAlphabet’s dominance yet, but it has staked out its starting ground.

Apple is the gateway that could be hit by the DMA because there are several competitors that can challenge the apple’s app store dominance. Apple makes big money because of its app store monopoly, over 85 billion dollars per year.

New conditions for developers that are burdensome are what the changes that will be in the new version ofiOS 17.4 will come with for EU residents. Its incoming policies would reduce the commission Apple takes for apps hosted on third-party app stores, but enforce a €0.50 (around 54 cents USD) The only way to avoid a Core Technology Fee if they reach over a million downloads is to stick with their original commission rate.

Penfrat went as far as to call these changes “malicious,” saying they could actually make matters much worse for developers trying to get away from Apple’s app store monopoly. “Under the current Apple proposal, it seems unlikely anyone would even attempt to challenge the gatekeeper’s monopoly. It’s simply not worth it. If the EU Commission permits this to happen, the DMA will be lost.

Companies haven’t lined up to accept Apple’s offer A handful of third-party app marketplaces have been announced by Epic, MacPaw, and Mobivention, but only the latter claims it’ll be available for iOS users on March 7th, right after the DMA takes effect. Both Google and Mozilla seem to be experimenting with new browsers for the iPad but neither company has confirmed when those will be available.

Meta has a long history of taking on rivals such as social networks and messaging services. The services covered by theDMA are spread across these areas.

Targeted advertising is Meta’s bread and butter, and last year it aimed to address concerns by letting users pay to avoid ads — launching a €9.99 per month ad-free tier for Facebook and Instagram, then giving the tier (as of March 1st) an extra fee for linked accounts. It paused ads for users younger than 18 and there is no clear plan for the future.

The choice to use a paid option resulted in a lawsuit from the European Consumer Organisation, which claimed that users don’t have a real choice. Meta announced in January that they had introduced a number of other data protection features, including the ability to separate Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Third-party messaging is a big change for many people, as was announced by Meta last year. Wired recently outlined what this third-party messaging support might look like for WhatsApp and Messenger, and we expect more details as the DMA takes effect.

Despite Meta appealing some parts of its designation, these changes are in the works. In November, it said that Messenger was an integrated Facebook feature and the latter was a consumer-to-consumer service. The challenge continues as of this week’s deadline.

The EU’s new competition rules are going live — here’s how tech giants are responding – why the US isn’t

Amazon is built on a huge third-party marketplace and complex data collection system, which has caused some sellers to complain that it gives it an unfair advantage. The online marketplace and advertising business are part of the company’s business.

Amazon will give advertisers and publishers with campaigns in the EU new, expanded reports that they can access from their website. The reports include more detailed information on how much an advertiser is paying for an ad and how much a publisher is getting from that ad on a third party website or app. The company is also rolling out a new “clean room” for advertisers with campaigns in the EU, allowing them to “independently verify the success and impact of their campaigns in a privacy-safe, cloud-based environment.”

Microsoft has the ability to keep a low level of apps and services inside its operating system, because it falls under the regulations of the Dallas Morning News.

The software giant had to make a number of changes to comply including disabling Bing web search, giving Edge a new option to uninstall and allowing companies to add their own custom web searches into Windows. Users in the EU countries and other states in the EEA are able to get these options.

Some critics argued that the EU was unfairly targeting American companies because ByteDance was included. (A second non-US-based company, Samsung, was initially named but later removed from the gatekeeper list.) California Democrat Lou Correa, the ranking member on the US House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, led a letter late last year with more than 20 bipartisan colleagues, criticizing the “clear targeting of U.S. companies by EU policies, especially under the DMA.” It was criticized that the European Commission didn’t name Chinese firms that are competing with US firms in the EU and other markets.

Source: The EU’s new competition rules are going live — here’s how tech giants are responding

Apple hasn’t listened to the EU’s gatekeepers: The cost of doing what works for small businesses and how big can companies be?

ByteDance shared a story about how TikTok plans to follow the rules. European users can use the tool to transfer data to other apps that have registered with TikTok. Registered developers can port posts, followers, and other activity from TikTok to their own apps with users’ permission. TikTok said it’s also improved its “Download your Data” tool that lets individual users export and download their posts and other information. And it will have “enhanced data portability solutions” for business accounts.

In order to overturn its designation as a gatekeeper, the company is implementing changes that make it easier for people to use the platform. The company says that TikTok does not meet the necessary revenue threshold, and that the Commission has based it on ByteDance’s global market cap.

But some experts believe the status quo is unlikely to shift. Many of these companies have announced compliance plans in response to the directive, and for the most part, they are not likely to result in a loss of power. Apple appears to be engaging in malicious compliance that is leaving European developers at a disadvantage.

That makes it difficult to gauge how much consumers and smaller competitors actually stand to gain. Jan Penfrat, senior policy advisor at European Digital Rights (EDRi) told The Verge that none of the changes proposed by gatekeepers “have led to any meaningful change to the power structures that help keep those companies at the top,” though he notes that some actions will take time to yield results. It is possible that this could snowball into a benefit for small providers, though it remains to be seen.

It’s fine for apps with a limited number of users, but they can become victims of their success if they charge too much. An example given by David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, finds that Meta would need to pay Apple $135 million each year alone to host just Instagram on a competing app store.

Progressive Web Apps and the DMA: Apple’s Open Access Policy in the EU has been re-considered with Safari’s WebKit

Apple previously decided to drop support for progressive web apps (PWAs) in the EU, going as far as to blame the DMA. After facing a potential investigation from the EU, the company has walked back that decision. PWAs will continue to exist — though they’ll have to be built on WebKit, the engine used by Safari. As one of its responses to the DMA, Apple is allowing third-party browsers to use their own engines in iOS in the EU. But PWAs downloaded through those browsers will still be reliant on Safari’s WebKit.