The European Union (UE) recently introduced a new regulatory policy called the ‘Digital Markets Act’ (DMA). It is said that this step has been taken mainly to prevent the dominance of tech giants of different countries and to ensure fair competition in the digital sector. In this new policy, platforms providing messaging services will be considered as gatekeepers to ensure interoperability between different platforms. This decision has been taken to provide more convenient communication options to the residents of the total 27 countries of the European Union.
And in compliance with the ‘Digital Markets Act’ (DMA) policy, popular instant messaging platform WhatsApp is set to roll out new features that will allow users to access chats from other messaging platforms like Telegram and Discord. This news was brought to the public by WhatsApp’s feature development tracker site WABetaInfo. According to a recent report by the site, this feature has been spotted in the latest beta version of ‘iOS for WhatsApp’.
WhatsApp is not the only messaging app that needs to comply with the DMA policy. The European Union is also trying to bring Apple’s iMessage platform under this policy. In this regard, the tech giant claims that iMessage is not an app that provides gatekeeper services. A total of 45 million (4.5 crore) people in the European Union are using this platform. Where about 500 million (50 crore) residents are comfortable using WhatsApp. Keeping this comparison in mind, Tim Cook’s organization is trying to avoid the DMA policy. However, whether the European Commission will accept Apple’s argument will be known only after the final verdict is announced.
If Apple could avoid the obligations of the DMA policy, the iMessage platform would not have to provide third-party chat support. But if the ruling goes against Apple, the company will be forced to bring iMessage chat access to other platforms.
However, WhatsApp, the messaging platform owned by Meta, cannot in any way violate the ‘Digital Markets Act’ (DMA) regulatory policy introduced by the European Union. Therefore, knowing that security issues would arise, the organization accepted being forced to be a gatekeeper under the law.
