Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
On March 24th, EU governing bodies announced that they had reached a deal on the most sweeping legislation to target Big Tech in Europe, known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Seen as an ambitious law with far-reaching implications, the most eye-catching measure in the bill would require that every large tech company — defined as having a market capitalization of more than €75 billion or a user base of more than 45 million people in the EU — create products that are interoperable with smaller platforms. For messaging apps, that would mean letting end-to-end encrypted services like WhatsApp mingle with less secure protocols like SMS — which security experts worry will undermine hard-won gains in the field of message encryption.
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