today's important informative thread: the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA), and Digital Services Act (DSA), is a pair of acts currently being considered that are supposed to reduce the power of tech monopolies. i'll just be talking about the DMA for now.

the DMA defines tech monopolies as "gatekeeper platforms" and tries to stop them from forcing you use their products, with fines of up to 10% of their annual global revenue if they break these laws.

these laws include:
-Banning uninstallable apps
-Forcing apple, google etc. to allow third party app stores
-Stopping gatekeepers from promoting their own products over competitors'
-Banning rules against sellers offering discounts if you don't buy through gatekeepers' platforms

it also means your data on a gatekeeper's platform can't be combined with your ad data that's already for sale online to build a record of you, and stops gatekeepers from collecting data from purchases made from businesses using the gatekeeper's platform.

most interestingly to me, it mandates "ancillary services" be interoperable and data be portable with real-time access.

in plain english:
-You can't be forced to use a gatekeeper's payment processing services, cloud services, etc.
-Gatekeepers' platforms must allow you to transfer data to other software
-Gatekeepers must let you use their services *through* other software

that last point is fascinating - we could have apps that combine your messages from messenger/telegram/signal/imessage/etc. into one single app.

now, the bad news: mostly, this doesn't go far enough. this act could mandate full interoperability between platforms such as messaging platforms but doesn't, instead forcing a content aggregator situation as described above.

also, more concerningly, it bans individual states from regulating on top of this act. this would be fine if the act was perfect, but seeing as a state couldn't overrule/undermine this act, they could only strengthen it with further national legislation.

i won't pretend to be an expert on the subject so feel free to post corrections if you spot a mistake in my research.
this has only just been announced this month, with YEARS of revisions to come before being signed off, voted on, and implemented… but it's interesting stuff!

((okay here's the bit when i say every tech monopoly should be broken up, and we should abandon capitalism altogether as a failed experiment, and also get rid of nation states. just in my opinion.))