The EU Just Decided in Big Tech’s Favor (This Time)
Big Tech and the EU haven’t been getting along lately. Companies such as Apple, Google and Meta have all had to make changes to the way they do business on the continent as the EU limits their ability to keep users locked into proprietary platforms.
However, Europe is not going to completely separate these companies. You can see this in the latest ruling: yesterday the European Commission decided that Apple and Microsoft should not be called “gatekeepers” of these services:
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iMessage (Apple)
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Bing (Microsoft)
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Edge (Microsoft)
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Microsoft Advertising (Microsoft)
The commission did not go into detail about what influenced their decisions in the case, but said it took into account denials from Apple and Microsoft, as well as the thoughts of stakeholders and the Digital Market Advisory Committee.
Apple and Microsoft are no doubt pleased with the European Commission’s decisions. For Apple, this means that the company will not need to open up its iMessage service to other platforms, allowing it to remain seamlessly tied to the Apple ecosystem. For Microsoft, Bing and Edge can continue to remain 100% controlled by Microsoft for search and web browsing, as can Microsoft Advertising for marketing.
Google, on the other hand, is not happy here. In a statement to The Verge, Google spokesperson Emily Clark said: “Excluding these popular services from the DMA rules means that consumers and businesses won’t be offered the breadth of choice that already exists on other, more open platforms.” The company is no doubt referring to its own platforms such as Android. For example, if the EU ruled against Apple, the company would have to give Android users access to iMessage, which would radically change the incentives to use the iPhone instead of Google’s platform.
This is exactly what is happening with Meta and its WhatsApp and Messenger platforms. The European Commission has considered these to be “essential platform services” and therefore Meta must open them up to work with third-party platforms. WhatsApp and Messenger users in the EU will soon find a new inbox in their apps that will receive messages from other chat apps, including theoretically iMessage, Google Messages, Signal, etc.
While Apple doesn’t have to worry about allowing third-party platforms to work with iMessage, the company’s strategy is still changing. The EU Commission has ruled that the Apple App Store, Safari and iOS are essential platform services and must be open. That’s why iOS 17.4, which is currently in beta, adds huge EU-specific changes , such as the ability to use third-party app stores, use third-party browsers that are not built on the Safari WebKit platform, and set new browsers as default .
However, most of these changes don’t apply to us in the US, so this decision won’t change much for us anyway. However, late last year the company had already announced big universal changes to messaging in anticipation of EU decisions: Apple will add RCS support to iMessage later this year, making messaging between iOS and Android devices much easier.