A report from Financial Times discusses the competition law regulations in the digital market, known as the DMA, enforced by the European Commission. These regulations, which came into effect last month, include a requirement for certain services to comply with the DMA if they have a large number of users and the ability to gatekeep their competitors.
The criteria for services to fall under the DMA is that they must have more than 45 million monthly users within the EU. Failure to comply with the regulations can result in fines of up to €7.5 billion per year. One of the requirements is that the system must be designed to support the use or connection of other developers’ services.
The report reveals that Apple and Microsoft have both submitted requests to the EU to exclude their online services from the DMA, namely iMessage from Apple and Bing from Microsoft. Both companies cited similar reasons for their requests, stating that these services have a low number of users and do not reach the threshold of 45 million users.
In the case of Apple, if iMessage is removed from the list of services covered by the DMA, it would mean that the platform would no longer have to support other messaging services going forward. However, the App Store, which has over 100 million users, still falls under the criteria and would need to support third-party stores, which has been previously reported.
For Microsoft, Windows services also fall under the criteria as they have a significant number of users.
Source: The Verge
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