Over the past few days, if you are in the European Union, you may have received a surprising message from the Messenger app, asking you to make a choice: keep using it with your Facebook account, or create a new Messenger account. You may also have noticed something new on Google, when looking for the address of a place: It's now impossible to click on the map that appears in your search results.
These two changes have one thing in common: They stem from the Digital Markets Act (DMA). This European regulation on digital markets came into force on Wednesday, March 6, and was designed to curb some of the digital giants' anti-competitive practices. The regulation currently applies to Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft and ByteDance, as well as 22 platforms that belong to them: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Messenger, Android, iOS, Windows, Google, Chrome, Safari, YouTube, as well as advertising services and the likes of Google Maps and Facebook Marketplace. The social media network X and hotel reservation site Booking.com are expected to be added soon.
This regulation has forced them to make changes to the way their platforms operate, with knock-on effects on their European users' experience.
The DMA has prohibited Google from ranking its own products more favorably in search engine results. For example, the company had to stop giving prominence to its flight comparison service, Google Flights, which used to appear at the top of search results when users searched for flights. Google Maps has disappeared from the top of the page when users search for certain places.
It has become possible to use Messenger, Meta's messaging service, without having a Facebook account. That's why, over the past few days, the app has been asking its European users to make a choice: keep using it with your Facebook account, or create a new Messenger account. Only if you choose the first option would you "be able to message your Facebook friends and communities," the message read.
Henceforth, iPhone users will be able to download applications without having to go through the App Store, Apple's official online store. As for in-app payments made in apps that are sold through the App Store, it became no longer mandatory for them to be processed via Apple. According to Apple, these regulations are problematic, as the company warned at the end of January that they could "open new avenues for malware, fraud and scams, illicit and harmful content, and other privacy and security threats" to its users.
The DMA stipulates that certain services must be able to be uninstalled. For example, Microsoft has been required to allow Windows users to uninstall – if they so choose – some of the applications that are provided with the operating system by default, such as the virtual assistant Cortana or the browser Edge.
Apple and Google, meanwhile, have to make it easier for iOS and Android users to choose a default web browser that is not necessarily the one they have developed – respectively, Safari and Chrome.
Companies affected by the DMA are prohibited from "cross-using" data collected across different platforms to target advertising to their users without their consent – a practice at the core of Google's and Meta's business models. This is why users have recently received messages asking them for permission to, for example, cross-use data between Google and YouTube or Instagram and Facebook.
Meta's messaging services, WhatsApp and Messenger, will have to be made interoperable with other competing messaging apps, if requested by the latter. This would mean, for example, that a WhatsApp user could not only send and receive messages from a Messenger user, but also from a Signal user – without having to switch applications. This service would not be available immediately, as the company said in February to Wired magazine, not least because it would need to be organized with competing messaging services.
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.