Let global principles guide messaging interoperability

While the final text of the draft has yet to be made available to the public, several commentators have access to the final versions of the draft agreement and have started discussing what this means for the tech ecosystem on social media. Will happen. , From what has been leaked so far, it appears that a key area of ​​regulatory focus is going to be interoperability.

It’s not hard to figure out why.

The winner-take-all nature of the platform economy means that in almost all instances, there will be only one major platform in a given vertical. What’s more, since major platforms can easily be used to enter adjacent sectors, there is a real fear that dominance in one vertical will create a wide-ranging hitting zone for innovation around the domain in which investors are involved. Are clear of anything from afar. The range of interest of the forum.

Given their first mover advantage over the Internet, American companies occupy most of these positions of dominance. This has made it nearly impossible for domestic alternatives in the EU to gain enough market share to inspire survival hopes. As a result, there is a real fear that American companies will digitally dominate Europe. By enforcing mandatory interoperability through the Digital Markets Act, European regulators are attempting to loosen the grip of major platforms on their customer bases to give at least smaller companies a chance to survive in adjacent sectors.

An example of imperative interoperability that has inspired animated discussions in the tech world relates to messaging platforms, which will now need to interconnect with smaller messaging apps that make more and more requests. Commentators are quick to point out what kinds of problems this will lead to.

If fully encrypted services like WhatsApp and Signal are to essentially inter-operate with other messaging services (including those not encrypted in the same way), it is almost certain that they will not be able to provide the same level of privacy as they previously. Used to do For many users, given their individual circumstances and the sensitivity of their discussions, these privacy guarantees are an absolute necessity. Not only will they not be able to continue using these services once interoperability is mandated, it may be impossible for anyone to provide secure communications on a global scale. In addition, features specifically designed to work without affecting the basic privacy guarantees of these systems—spam detection, prohibited speech recognition, etc.—will not be able to function as if messages were sent to other services. If shared with them, they cannot be implemented.

As with all policy options, the decision to impose mandatory interoperable obligations has trade-offs. While its absence results in customer lock-in, affects consumer choice and overall competitiveness of the market, the emphasis on it makes it difficult for messaging services to guarantee confidentiality of communications.

Sometime in the future, it may be possible for us to ensure such privacy across multiple interoperable applications. However, the need for interoperability before these secure protocols can be built could result in an immediate degradation of a key feature of modern digital communications.

India, as I mentioned earlier in this column, is associated with a variety of trade-offs regarding secure messaging services on the Internet. By requiring messaging companies to trace the original sender of a message, India has prioritized law enforcement and national security concerns over the individual’s right to privacy in communications.

Some would argue that, despite its strong constitutional guarantees and liberal sentiments, America can still move forward on privacy in the same way Big Tech had not lost its heel.

All countries make such choices to promote their goals. Whether they want it that way or not, the policy trade-offs are a reflection of national priorities. In a pre-Internet world, these choices only affected individuals within the sovereign territory of a given country as soon as they moved outside its borders. Today, the global technology platform connects people, regardless of where they are physically located. When the choices required by one country run contrary to those imposed by the other, it becomes impossible for any platform to implement all of these conflicting policy priorities in a globally coherent manner.

All countries of the world need to come together to establish common policy principles that they can all agree to implement and then apply across global technology platforms. Until we do, the decision about what should or should not be done in navigating these complex trade-offs will be in the hands of the biggest global tech companies. Which, in turn, would represent the individual political view of their management.

Rahul Mathan is a participant in Trilegal and also a podcast called Ex Machina. His twitter handle @matthan . Is