Main Topic 1 – You on Signal and Me on Telegram – Messenger Interoperability by EU Regulation 

Exploring the impact of the EU’s Digital Markets Act on messaging service interoperability

During a comprehensive panel discussion on the interoperability of messaging services, experts delved into the implications of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) for users, service providers, and the digital market at large. The DMA aims to address the market dominance of certain messaging platforms, specifically Meta’s Messenger and WhatsApp, which the European Commission has designated as gatekeepers. The act mandates these gatekeepers to ensure interoperability, allowing users to communicate across different messaging services, thereby preventing user lock-in and fostering competition.

Irma Urmonaitė, representing the regulatory perspective, outlined the DMA’s phased implementation of interoperability requirements, beginning with one-to-one text messaging and eventually encompassing group messaging and voice and video calls. The European Commission, with technical expertise from bodies like BEREC, is closely monitoring the conditions set by gatekeepers to ensure they align with the DMA’s objectives.

Vittorio Bertola discussed the technical aspects of interoperability, highlighting the role of the IETF in developing a new common protocol for messaging interoperability. He emphasized that while the technical challenges are manageable, the primary obstacles are economic and political, requiring consensus among stakeholders. Bertola also addressed the importance of maintaining end-to-end encryption and privacy across different platforms.

Riccardo Nanni, providing the user’s perspective, expressed concerns about privacy when communicating across platforms with varying privacy standards. He questioned the consequences for platforms that choose not to comply with the DMA and the potential impact on users who rely on non-EU messaging services, such as WeChat.

The panelists also addressed the enforcement and compliance of the DMA. Urmonaitė explained that non-compliance could lead to significant fines and, as a last resort, structural remedies like breaking up companies. The discussion highlighted the importance of swift and effective enforcement to ensure the DMA’s success.

An audience member drew a parallel between the current discussion on interoperability and the past experience with telecommunication network interconnection, questioning whether the perceived complexity and cost were justified. Another audience member observed that discussions on portability vary between large apps and sectors like e-health, expressing concern about the responsibility for content when transferring to a receiving platform.

The panelists acknowledged that interoperability is a matter of degree, and that the scope of features required to be interoperable could affect the outcome. They also noted that the DMA covers a detailed list of features, including attachments, videos, photos, and voice calls.

In conclusion, the session emphasized the DMA’s potential to foster innovation and user choice in the digital market. The panelists expressed optimism about the potential for rapid enforcement and the positive changes the DMA could bring. However, they also recognized the need for the EU to act quickly and form alliances to ensure the regulations have a lasting impact. The discussion concluded with an invitation for continued dialogue on this critical issue.

Alena Muravska:
Thank you. Welcome, everyone. Before I present the panelists, I’ll present what this session will be about. So, imagine you have a group of friends and you want to coordinate something that’s going out. And you create a group chat, but all friends are on one messenger and one of the friends is not. So, what do you do? You need to inform that friend separately. And this might change the digital markets act. So, one of its propositions includes the interoperability, and that’s a difficult word, I must admit, of messaging services. So, providers of messaging services, they came together at the Internet Engineering Task Force to develop a standard for interoperability. And that might affect how we use the messengers. So, in this session, my panelists will give you insights in how it will affect end users, how it will affect the messenger services themselves, and what effect it will have to the competition. So, now, I would like you to answer a question on Menti. and we should soon have here a QR code on the screen. Okay, we won’t have a QR code. I’ll kindly ask you to go to menti.com. You see the address also written at the top of the screen and answer this question, please. Then they will know what is the audience here thinks about this. So the question is, have you ever experienced a situation like this? Like having to inform one friend who is not on the messenger that everyone else is? Yes, two answers, four. Okay, let’s see, four more. It’s still not very representative. We have more people in the room. Oh no, who are those two happy people who said no? Can you raise your hands, please? Okay, 11, 12, yes. Okay, I think we have quite a good picture of what’s happening in the room. And I would like to introduce the panelists today. So we have here with us Irma Urmonaitė, the Deputy Chairwoman of the Competition Council of Lithuania. Irma will give the perspective of the regulator. We have Riccardo Nanni, he is a researcher in data governance from Fondazione Bruno Kessler. And we have also Vittorio Bertola, he’s Head of Policy in Open Exchange. And Riccardo will give the user’s perspective and Vittorio will enlighten us from the technical point of view. And I would like to start this, Irma. Irma, can you give us, tell a few words about the Digital Markets Act and what is that purpose in relation to the messaging services?

Irma Urmonaitė:
Good afternoon, everyone. Just making sure you can hear me. So, indeed, as mentioned, messaging services have become a prominent, a key way how we communicate right now. And already some time ago, it was observed that a few messaging service platforms have a significant market share. So, the issue here with messaging services is that these markets provide a very strong network effect. So, what does it mean? It means the more users the platform has, the more appealing it is for me to stay on this platform or to use this platform. But on the other hand, it also makes it difficult for the users to move to a different platform. So, people simply don’t want to lose their connections that they already have on the given platform. So, the issue here is that customers, we all, we get locked into one specific service. We don’t really have a proper choice which messaging services to use. And the market, market is becoming less competitive and less contestable. So, the European Commission wanting to address this issue, it included a specific provision in the Digital Markets Act. So, the Digital Markets Act provide a set of rules for big tech companies seeking to open up digital markets. And this article requires gatekeepers to specific companies to ensure interoperability with their messaging services. So, basically making sure that users can exchange information from one messaging service to another messaging service. Of course, this requirement has a few specific features. It applies only to specific companies which are called gatekeepers. And as of today, Meta’s Messenger and WhatsApp have been designated as gatekeepers by the European Commission. Meta has already published a reference offer, a specific document outlining specific technical requirements for other messaging services in order to inter-operate with their services. So, things are evolving. We can pick up on the technical part probably later on. But this brings me to the second point is that while gatekeepers have the obligation to offer interoperability, it’s totally voluntary on the receiving end. So, both third-party providers and end users are free to choose whether to inter-operate with other services or not. Also, this requirement will be implemented in several different stages. So, upon designation, gatekeepers have to ensure that one-to-one text messaging, including the attachments, can be shared between the services. Within two years of designation, then we will move on to the messaging between group of individuals. And within four years, we will arrive at the stage where voice and video calls have to be implemented. There are some other conditions, such as security requirements and data minimization requirements, but probably we will not go into that detail right now. We can pick it up later on. And probably it would make sense to ask why we need to bother with these kind of regulations, why we need to open up these markets. And the goal of that provision in the Digital Markets Act is to foster an open and competitive digital communication landscape. So, this provision would ensure a more level playing field for smaller messaging services and would enable them to reach a wider audience. In a competitive market, users also benefit. They get to choose which messaging service to use. In the end of the day, they can even use one messaging app instead of several ones if they want to. Finally, I think where competition is ensured in the market, it also fosters innovation and the quality of better services. So it can also lead to situation where new services or new features would emerge in the messaging service markets.

Alena Muravska:
Thank you, Irma. Now I would like to ask Vittorio, what does interoperability mean from the technical point of view? So what are the perspectives and questions to the protocols themselves? What are the issues?

Vittorio Bertola:
Well, interoperability is one of the original key principles of the architecture of the Internet since the 70s and 80s. Put it very simply, interoperability means the ability of hardware and software by different makers to talk to each other and work together. So the simplest example in messaging of an interoperable messaging services is e-mail, which again, with something that has been existing for 40 years now or less. In e-mail, you can use different client software and apps by many different makers, some on your PC, some on your phone, and you can use services by many different providers. But all of these can work together. So actually, you have the possibility with the same app of using accounts from different e-mail providers, and also with a single account, a single e-mail address, you can communicate with all other e-mail users in the world, even if they are using different providers and different applications. This is not true with instant messages. Even if they are more recent, they’re more technologically advanced systems. This is why the reason for this is not technical. It’s purely commercial. It was designed to be like this. It was designed not to be interoperable. Actually, many of these messaging services use more or less the same protocols. and some of these protocols are even standard, so you can read how they work. Still, if you tried to use a different app to connect to the servers, for example, of WhatsApp, the servers of WhatsApp will not let you connect, just because of the way they are configured. So the technical discussion behind this is, how can I make different apps work together? There is a user side to this. So just imagine having your WhatsApp application. I say WhatsApp because it’s the most generally used, because today, I mean, the reason why it might happen that you don’t have to need to inform other people is that everyone gives up and installs WhatsApp anyway. And maybe you install also Telegram or others, but at least WhatsApp is. So just imagine having your WhatsApp interface, but in the contacts, you don’t just have the WhatsApp contacts, you have the contacts from Telegram and from all the other messenger apps. This is what we want to obtain. And the advantage of this is that you can only install one app and maybe it will not be WhatsApp, it will be a different app made in Europe, which will be maybe more privacy friendly. And so in the end, you can actually choose which messaging application to use. And so this also helps the competition side. But technically speaking, the problem then is, how can we agree on a technical system to talk to each other? Because all the different apps need to have a common language, a common protocol to exchange the information. And also need to understand, I mean, who the users are. So there’s a need to handle personal information so that WhatsApp can recognize someone who is actually a Telegram user, but maybe limit the amount of personal information that Telegram has to give WhatsApp about these users, just to the minimum necessary so that the connection can be established. And so these are all the sorts of technical and also, I’d say, behavioral issues and organizational issues that are now under discussion in the technical community. And for the moment, there are some stopgap solutions, immediate solutions to allow the first phase of the implementation of that. But still, the discussion is about in the long term, can we agree on a single protocol that everyone can use so that even, for example, open source developers without having a lot of money can develop a client for instant messaging.

Alena Muravska:
Thank you, Vittorio. Riccardo, the DMA in the end tries to assist the end users. Can you give the end users perspective?

Riccardo Nanni:
Yeah. Thank you. Can you hear me? Okay. Perfect. Thanks. Thanks for the question. I’m happy I can jump into the conversation after my colleagues because they’ve already provided a lot of points for discussion. From a user perspective, I believe that the interoperability of messaging applications is fundamental for a number of reasons. We’ve all been in the position where after having bought a cell phone for a few years, the cell phone itself is still working, it’s still fine, but we started having problems with memory, for example. This is because there are messaging apps that are as heavy as one gig without all the data that we get to download. So having interoperability would favor us also on the way we could preserve the memory of the space on our phone, but also the fact that we can choose a privacy preserving app, as Vittorio pointed out. However, as a user, I would have a couple of concerns. The first one regards privacy. Because it’s true that I can choose a more privacy protecting, privacy preserving application, but what happens when I communicate with a person who’s using a less privacy preserving application? Which of the two privacy protection levels or standards apply? This would be a very, probably naive, but important question to answer from a user perspective. The second question I have from a user’s perspective is, what happens to those applications, to those platforms that choose not to comply with the legislation? I would expect legislation at that point to be binding. So will they be forced in some way to comply or would they be simply banned from the European market? So I spent some time in China in the past. I have friends in China with whom I connect on WeChat, for example. And I also have Chinese friends in Europe who connect with their families on WeChat because that’s the main application in China. What if Tencent decides not to comply with the legislation? Will it be more difficult for people who live in Europe to be in touch with people who live in China, where WhatsApp, for example, is not available? I’m making this an example because the context I know better, but it could make similar examples with applications based in North America, where maybe they want to have other incentives in making market choices. So yes, in conclusion, these are my two main concerns from a user perspective that I’d like to discuss today. Thanks.

Alena Muravska:
Thank you, Ricardo. You raised very important questions. And I would like Irma, if she can respond to what messengers will the DMA cover and what if they won’t comply with this legislation?

Irma Urmonaitė:
Thank you. So the DMA applies, like I mentioned, only to the specific companies that are designated by the European Commission. They evaluate and assess all the data and establish which companies have a significant power in the European Union. So as of today, we have Meta, Messenger, and WhatsApp designated as so-called gatekeepers that have to comply with the legislation. So the thing is that DMA is the European Union regulation. It applies to the companies that are active in the European Union market regarding the consumers, regarding the users that are in the European Union. So, of course, we can’t force META to apply this policy globally, and this is not the goal of the DMA, but if they are willing to go beyond the borders of the EU, of course it’s totally possible, but it’s up to them. What happens if these companies do not comply? The European Commission has the power to initiate investigations, infringement investigations, and impose, well, fines as a first resort, so the fines can reach up to 10% of the company’s annual turnover. If the company is still breaching the law and is not complying, the Commission can go up to 20%, and there are some possibilities of imposing structural remedies, so basically like breaking up the companies, but I’m pretty sure this might be considered as a last resort. On the receiving end, as I mentioned, it’s totally voluntary whether third-party providers are willing to interoperate, and the end users also have a say if they are not willing to do it, they don’t have to, and here I think it’s a very valid point, because the DMA applies to the European Union users, but if the user is travelling somewhere, and we were discussing briefly before the session, what will happen to those users? Can we still have the possibility to interoperate with other apps? And the question here is open, we don’t have a clear answer right now, there is ongoing debate I think also with the gatekeepers, just to decide exactly to which extent this obligation might go.

Alena Muravska:
Thank you Irma. I would like to go back to the technical aspects of these questions, and I would like to ask Vittorio what specific role the IETF plays in this question, and what is the working group currently discussing regarding interoperability?

Vittorio Bertola:
Well, sure, I mean there is a basic problem for Europe in this, I mean Europe has standardisation organisations like SENSENEC and ETSI. that are recognized by law. But the standards of the internet traditionally are done at the ITF, which is this global organization, but it’s an American organization, but acting globally, which is also working in a very open way. So everyone can just go there and join the discussion. And so it was just natural that when the DMA was approved, the ITF opened a working group called MIMI, more instant messaging interoperability, that is working on a new common protocol. And there already are technical protocols from the past that would allow some kind of global interoperable chat, but they are old and so they don’t meet today’s needs. And so there’s the need to put together various pieces and come up with something new. And so this is the work that has been ongoing. And I’d say it’s going well. I mean, it’s proceeding. There’s been a lot of technical discussions made. And when you start thinking at, for example, putting together maybe 10 people in a group with audio and video and with messages flowing across maybe five or six different platforms, technically it’s not that easy, especially with even the internet that often sometimes may lose some of your messages or your messages might get to the destination in a different order in respect to when they were sent. So what happens if the network connectivity, for example, disappears for a while? And then when it comes back, you have to put together the conversation. So there are a lot of technical issues that have to be solved. And of course, in a monopoly platform, when the same platform has the app and the server and everything in behind, they can just solve this. In a distributed world, it’s more difficult. But then also the discussion is about the identity path. And this is where I think there might be more problems because, I mean, in the end, the ITF is mostly led by American people and companies. Still, the big tech companies are the big leaders in many of the ITF groups. And so the mindset is still very, let’s say, Silicon Valley-like. So, for example, the discussion is, do we need the directory of all the users of instant messages since, so that when I have a telephone number of my contact, but I don’t know if they are using WhatsApp or Telegram or Signal or whatever, I need to go somewhere and ask, okay, well, where’s the platform where I can reach them so that I can add to my conversation? And then, and many in this group say, but we just need a very big directory of all the users of the world and we ignore, and we keep it maybe by, in one platform only and some even say well Meta is the biggest platform so let’s just give Meta all the data of all the users of all instant messengers in the world and I think that from a European privacy perspective this is not the solution we want so this is the kind of technical discussion which also has I mean privacy and legal implications so it’s not a purely technical discussion and in a way Europe discounts the not being the leader in these technologies anymore so the fact that we have to go to an American organization basically even if it’s very global to discuss these things but I mean we will see where whether this succeeds and what we get and I think in the end the commission will have to examine whether the technical results are compliant with the spirit and the letter of the DMA and could even say no we don’t want to do this protocol because it doesn’t meet the objectives but hopefully we will find a way to make everyone happy.

Alena Muravska:
Thanks Vittorio. You just mentioned that at the end we will see if it will succeed and maybe Ricardo you can elaborate on from your researcher’s perspective what would be the measure for success of that interoperability and the DMA?

Riccardo Nanni:
Of course we can only speculate on that but we saw for example with GDPR and the fact that it’s got some form of extraterritorial application that companies change their cookie policies for their websites when it applies for EU-based users so what happened in that particular case was that these companies had an interest at their websites being functional and being operating in the European Union and so they adapted to the EU legislation. So what we can expect to see is that as long as the European Union is the biggest single market in terms of GDP it’s likely that companies will want to be able to participate in the European market and so if the EU pushes forward some form of legislation that requires some form of interoperability. Platform companies, based in the Silicon Valley or elsewhere, will want to abide by that legislation, at least partially, at least as far as the EU is concerned, and then maybe they operate under slightly different standards in the US where they don’t allow for the same interoperability, for example. This is pretty much the kind of scenario I can imagine. I think it’s very hard for the European Union to have quote-unquote teeth in its legislation because, as Vittorio has anticipated, the European industry doesn’t have a strong leadership position in some of these sectors. But on the other hand, the economic weight of the US domestic market is still a weapon that the EU can use, and is using, sometimes effectively, sometimes not, to push forward the application of its legislation.

Alena Muravska:
Thank you, Ricardo. I would like to thank all speakers for now and turn back to the audience, because we all are users, it’s all about us, and it will affect us all, and open the floor for questions.

Online moderator:
Yeah, I will take the first one. Those two lights indicate questions from online. And so the first one is from Lufuno. It is great to hear that issues around digital public goods are interoperability, like interoperability, are being considered too for messengers. I would like to understand more on how are the OEMs going to achieve this desired state of interoperable messengers? Are there specific guidelines that they should adhere to in their development and or reconfiguration of their systems? Some of the messengers are not included. How will issues of encryption and configuration work to achieve interoperability? Is the objective of interoperability intended to promote a people-centered approach? If not, what is the main objective?

Alena Muravska:
I would like to take the question, maybe Vittorio.

Vittorio Bertola:
I think we don’t want to get too much into the technicalities at this point in time. The idea is that for the moment, the way the DMA puts this is that the gatekeeper has to say to the others what they have to do to interoperate. So it’s the gatekeeper that sets the minimum levels, and Meta has been very clear that they want to ensure end-to-end encryption, for example, of all the communications, even when they go to people that are using other apps. At the same time, we need to do the technical part to allow this, because in a way, the only way to allow this is if everyone is using the same encryption standard all across all the different platforms. And this is possibly the desire and state, even of the ITFs, also the work that the technical community is doing is meant to enable end-to-end encryption between all the communications in all the apps. Then, of course, it’s also the user that has to care about whether they want to use this or not.

Irma Urmonaitė:
And probably just to jump in from the perspective of regulator, so the DMA, that’s right, it left the options open for the gatekeeper to decide or to offer the interoperability terms, but of course, the European Commission is closely monitoring and looking at what kind of conditions are being put there. And it’s also in close cooperation with BEREC, a body of European regulators for electronic communications. They are also providing technical expertise, and BEREC has already commented on the draft reference offer that was published. So I believe that also from the regulator’s side, there is a huge expertise being built up. And I think with all the legislation that is being going on in the background, the European Commission, together with other regulatory bodies, would be in place to monitor and to have a say whether these… the standards and conditions are appropriate.

Riccardo Nanni:
I don’t have much to add, but I have a follow-up question. But I see we got another question from online. So which order do we want to go?

Alena Muravska:
Let’s take your question first, and then that.

Riccardo Nanni:
OK. So my follow-up question would be on the identified gatekeepers. Because you mentioned that the European Commission is currently identifying gatekeepers to whom the DMA applies. And you said META is one of them. How does it work? Is there a constant monitoring? So if gatekeepers change throughout time, they designate new ones? How does it work?

Irma Urmonaitė:
Yes, so last year, there was a first round of designation. So the Commission did the first review. But of course, the Commission is to watch closely the market. And if there are any changes, of course, new companies can be designated that will have to comply with the requirement. However, I think it’s important to note that if we speak about messaging services in the European Union, those two companies, WhatsApp and Messenger, have a really significant market share. So it’s like between 80% and 90%. So probably a question remains how likely it is that we will have another messaging service being designated. Apple messaging service was being considered as a gatekeeper. But the Commission decided that the data that had been provided to the Commission was not sufficient to conclude that Apple should be designated as a gatekeeper in regards of its messaging platform.

Alena Muravska:
Irma, can we have a question from online participant?

Online moderator:
OK. I’ve requested to open mic. and CAM, but the person is not responding, so I think we should move along.

Alena Muravska:
So we don’t have a question from the online participant, we have a question from the floor here.

Auidence:
Yes, my name is Valtan Atres, and I used to be a regulator a long time ago, and that was when the telecommunication market was liberated, and all these new networks had to connect with the incumbents, and that was called interconnection. And when the lawyer of the incumbent visited us, he said, it is totally impossible to do this, and if it’s possible, then it takes so many changes, and it’s tremendously expensive. We visited one of the things of the incumbents where all the interconnection took place, and this mechanic walked down the aisle with this wire in his hand, and he stuck it in somewhere, and then we asked him, what are you doing? Oh, I just transferred somebody to another network. And how long does it take? Well, 30 seconds. So in other words, you saw the 2 million a year earning lawyer deflate. So in how far is this discussion different? Because in the end, we identify with our device, which has a telephone number, otherwise you can’t reach it. So in other words, is this so much more difficult to do than it used to be in the 1990s when we liberated the telecommunications network? So I’m curious of the answer. Thank you.

Alena Muravska:
Thank you. Who would like to take this question? Vittorio, please.

Vittorio Bertola:
Well, I would say technically it is not difficult. I mean, we already had this kind of interoperable messaging service. I mean, people that are a little older, like I am, I remember ILC, or I remember Jabber, which was a similar federated service. So of course, there are technical problems to be solved. So the point is that it’s not difficult as long as the engineers from all the companies and all the community meet and agree on something that works. The risk is sometimes that some of the companies that try to agree on something that doesn’t work. Because in the end, there are big economic interest in this. To be honest, I haven’t seen Meta Engineers doing anything to stop these at this point in time. I also have not seen them participate a lot in the community discussions. So they might be more or less in a wait and see mode, and let’s see whether the other people in the community come up with something that could be used or not. But I know also there are a lot of discussions behind the scenes. For example, one thing that I know is being discussed is the reach of these because Meta positively does not want to open to anyone but EU users. So if you are a user from the US, you will not get the button that says, okay, let’s turn on interoperability. There’s even discussion of what happens if the US comes to the EU in vacation. Do they get it? Do they get it only for the time in which they stay in Europe? But then the problem is that Meta is also apparently asking the new coming apps, the open source apps, to identify where the users are in the EU. If they have users not in the EU, they should be prevented from interoperating. Of course, the other apps are like, no, we’re not going to do this. This is a breach of privacy. We don’t want to know whether our users are in the EU or not. So this is also the discussions that are partly technical, but mostly not technical. I think that mostly the problems are not technical.

Irma Urmonaitė:
Just to add on this, I think interoperability in the telecommunication sector is a good example, but also we often refer to the open banking, the discussions that started in the UK and were later transformed into the form of European Union Payment Service Directive, which basically obliged banks to give up, to give the access to their data to fintechs. And it actually worked. And we are speaking about very commercially sensitive data. So, just to illustrate that in other sectors it has been working, so probably when it comes to the messaging services, it should be feasible as well.

Alena Muravska:
Thank you. Riccardo?

Riccardo Nanni:
Yeah, just to agree that it’s a matter of finding the right soft spot in companies economic interest really and finding a way to make sure that they see an advantage or at least a lesser disadvantage in abiding by this particular requirement rather than not. And this is because we’ve had interoperable messaging applications since forever. In a way, emails are also an interoperable messaging application. If I have Gmail and you have Outlook, we can easily exchange emails, so why can’t that be on a messaging application? I agree with Vittorio that the problem is mainly economic, mainly political in a broader sense rather than technical.

Alena Muravska:
Thank you. We have now four questions in the queue, one from online participant and three from the floor. So, we start with the online participant.

Auidence:
Thank you very much. So, I am based in The Hague. I am representing civil society and I have a non-profit called Find Out Why, where we promote digital fluency. My question is around just rethinking the way that we’re approaching this idea of interoperability. And I’m wondering if anyone has worked with gaming designers, you know, for CS Go, for example, if you go to the company, the software company called Valve, or if you’re thinking about Steam and the way that we, not we, I don’t play games, but for those who do gaming. there’s already this solution for doing interoperability in terms of a dashboard. And then I think also about, I do foundational design, I think about Spotify and the way that we’re using different platforms rather than using messenger from meta or etc, go to a different kind of perspective. And the final question that I have is, do any of you work with the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions in IIS out of Finland? Because there are a lot of people for e-governance that have already addressed these issues that I just want to say, from civil society standpoint and from a design standpoint, there are a lot of solutions that exist and I think that we don’t do interoperability design as well across sectors. So I wanted to bring in the idea of online gaming and the way that the global youth already have this interoperability world sort of put into their psyches as 15-year-olds and 20-year-olds. Thank you for taking my questions.

Alena Muravska:
Thank you for the question. Who would like to respond?

Vittorio Bertola:
Well, I think it’s important. First of all, interoperability is a very broad term. There’s a lot of people working on interoperability in basically any sector. So for example, there’s a lot of discussion of interoperability in the public administration in Europe, which is completely different from this. In terms of user interfaces, the ITF positively does not do user interfaces. It does not want to specify user interfaces. It only specifies the technical communication, so the bits that are flowing over the Internet. The law also does not specify user interfaces. I think that the law says that you cannot use like dark patterns to make interoperability difficult. So the gatekeeper should not use the very threatening messages or something that pushes users not to interoperate. But apart from this, it’s completely free. The reason for this is that the user interface is one of the main elements of competition. So this is really where the competition between the different apps should happen. So, in a way, I would do what you suggest, but I think it’s the app makers that have to do that and come up with the best possible user interface, and the person that will come up with the company, that will come up with the best user interface, will win the market.

Alena Muravska:
Thank you, Vittorio. So, we have three questions from the floor, and I would suggest quickly take them. The first question is here, please.

Auidence:
Yes, Giacomo Mazzone, EuroDeep board member. My question is more than a question, it’s a consideration, because it’s eminent a political first and economic question. Technical, I think, is only a sub-judgmental dimension of the problem. I think that the key is enforcement. Europe has made a lot of promises that now need to be at the level of the promises it has made. The GDPR, the enforcement will be when the fines will be finally paid by the big giants. Until that moment, this is not yet the end of the game. And this position that Ricardo was mentioning before, that Europe is a strong position because we are the biggest GDP market, single market around the world. This doesn’t last for very long. This will last for the next 10 years, no more than that. So we need to move quickly in enforcing the things now and find alliance around the world, because I think that what we are doing is something that is beneficiary for all the rest of the world. We are leading the way, but if we remain alone along this way, we will lose at the end of the day the battle. The decision on META of the other day, I don’t know if it’s confirmed, about not training AI in Europe within the European Union because of the European Union requirements, is a sign that has to be very worrying. Because we need to regulate, but the regulation without enforcement doesn’t bring too far. The banking system example. The banking system, you cannot apply. Here we have monopolies. With the banking system, you have banks everywhere that are based and rooted in Europe, while we are talking here of Internet platforms that are not based in Europe. And they are in Europe only because there is a market that interests them until they will be interested in the market. So we need to look at this perspective. If we don’t look at this perspective and we don’t find alliance and we don’t spread our example around the world, we will remain isolated. Thank you.

Alena Muravska:
Thank you. I’ll suggest to take two speakers from the floor, and then I’ll ask the speakers to respond to one of them.

Auidence:
My name is Paul Kronberg. I’m from the Internet Society. Thank you very much to the organizers and to the panelists for this great session. I had one question. We tend to talk about interoperability as this binary condition, but the reality is that interoperability is often a matter of degree. It’s kind of like you’re speaking a language, we’re all speaking English here, and sometimes you can have some information lost that doesn’t make it 100% interoperable, for instance. And when it comes to these messaging applications that we’re talking about, we have so far only sort of envisioned them as text messaging. But when we look at applications like WhatsApp, like Signal, there’s also the ability to send, for instance, voice memos, et cetera. So my question is, first of all, what is sort of the scope of features that are required to be interoperable in these mandates, and how might that scope affect the sort of envisioned outcome? For instance, if the mandate is only to have text being the interoperable feature, what happens if we don’t have interoperability of sending voice memos, for instance? And has there been any… about that. Thank you.

Alena Muravska:
A very good question, but for the sake of time, I would like to hear the last person from the audience. There is one person here, please, in the center of the room.

Auidence:
Thank you so much. Actually, I have one question and one observation. Observation first. Is it correct or it seems to me that we have two discussions totally different on portability. On large apps such as WhatsApp and so on. This is totally in the area of digital services act. Then we have portability such as e-health and so on. Still the question is this correct, this observation. The second is what they always saw in professional practices. Responsibility for content. In the picture. I am wondering what the receiving platform is saying about getting all kinds of maybe weird content to care for.

Alena Muravska:
Very good question. I would like to ask you to respond to anything that you just heard. Yes, sure.

Riccardo Nanni:
Very good point. I agree. GDPR is not always enforced as it should. Indeed, that applies to a lot of legislations. Enforcement works better in certain conditions and less well in others. You are right. We can’t talk of full enforcement until the EU becomes capable of imposing fines and actually getting the money it requests. That’s the example I made before. They choose to abide by the legislation because they see an advantage. In particular in participating in… the largest single market. And here again, you made a valid comment. GDP’s relative size doesn’t last forever. It’s not a permanent characteristic of a market. And this is why the European Union, as I mentioned, to have teeth in enforcing values, legislation, whatever it is, has to develop industry. And possibly, I’m not saying this is necessarily the case, but possibly this interoperability discussion is an opportunity for that. Because it could allow some EU-based messaging platforms, for example, to come out and go, hey, you know, you can use our platform, better user interface, better privacy protection and whatnot, and you can still message with your friends who are on WhatsApp. So no vendor lock-in of any sort. And possibly this could be an opportunity if carefully used and elaborated upon for the European Union to develop its own domestic industry in a context in which, in a sector in which historically it’s quite weak. But I’m just trying to be optimistic here, and I will leave the floor.

Alena Muravska:
Yeah, and before I give the floor to Vittorio, just one heads up. In the end, we’ll have one more mentee question. So please don’t rush to lunch. No mentee questions? Okay, so Nadia said no mentee questions. Yeah, okay.

Vittorio Bertola:
So I’ll try to be very quick. Well, to Giacomo, there’s other countries that are copying the DMA, that Japan just approved it. I don’t know what it says on messaging. But so I think everybody in the world, except the US and China, has the problem and will come up with something similar. I mean, in terms of features, yes, the law has a very exhaustive list of features, even too much in detail, in my opinion. So it does say that interoperability should cover attachments and videos and photos and voice calls. I mean, there’s a… There’s different times to get into this, but it will have to interoperate on everything. In terms of content, yes, we know we have a problem with potential spam going through this interoperability, like it happens in e-mail. We already have spam in messaging anyway. We already have phishing and cheating. I mean, the problem of content is there. I think we will have to come up with creative solutions and we will work them along the way, because it needs to be done anyway. It’s a problem that exists anyway, and we just have to learn by doing.

Alena Muravska:
Your final words, one minute, because we’re already over time. Thirty seconds. I just want to say,

Irma Urmonaitė:
I’m personally coming from the field of competition law, and in that field, the investigations lasted years. I think knowing that problematic aspect, I think this is why DMA was adopted with the hope that these can be enforced way much faster than we’re doing in the competition law to certain behaviors in the digital markets. So I’m really hopeful that we can have a more rapid reaction from the European Commission and all the enforcers.

Alena Muravska:
Thanks, everyone. We are a bit over time, but this is your well-deserved lunch time. The best words and the best conclusion. You can continue our discussions during the break and see you at 2.30 here for the next session, big session.