Digital Markets Act is a Disaster for European Consumers

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📢 NEW POST: Europe's Digital Markets Act implementation deadline is this Thursday, March 7. My new post takes a closer look at the practical ways that DMA is poised to make tech products worse for European consumers: medium.com/chamber-of-progress/europes-digital-market-act-fails-consumers-dcaf70cc548c

In short, the Digital Markets Act degrades the quality of Big Tech products used by millions of Europeans — removing useful features, reducing security, unleashing spam and hate, undermining parental controls, and making services harder to use. Let's take a closer look...

1️⃣ Mandatory app “sideloading” on iOS — despite EU governments’ private wishes. It's well known that the DMA forces Apple to open up iOS to "sideloading" of apps without App Store review. It turns out, many EU govts privately oppose this!

Apple: "Govt agencies, both in the EU and outside of it […] have reached out to us about these new changes, seeking assurances that they will have the ability to prevent government employees from sideloading apps onto government-purchased iPhones."

In other words, DMA's sideloading mandate is a security own-goal for Europe. EU govts recognizing that sideloading can make devices less secure, and want a work-around for their own law.

On top of that, a lot of consumers value Apple's longtime ban on sideloading. DMA forces iOS to operate more like Android - but fails to appreciate that many consumers *value* Apple's walled garden

2️⃣ Undermining content moderation of apps Remember when Apple banned the Parler app after Jan 6th? Or when it banned Infowars' app due to Sandy Hook denialism? DMA's sideloading ban means that hate & hoax apps can now easily bypass Apple's content moderation.

What's especially rich about this is that EU's Digital Services Act requires that platforms pay timely attention to content moderation. So DMA's sideloading mandate is in direct conflict with DSA's focus on content moderation. And it will create a hate app free-for-all.

3️⃣ Evading parental controls Apple's "Ask to Buy" means that parents can control which apps their kids download to their phones. But DMA breaks this feature entirely, by allowing clever teens to sideload an app from the DMA-mandated alternative app stores.

As Apple notes (developer.apple.com/security/complying-with-the-dma.pdf) this will mean that parents will have to fend for themselves in trying to make sure that their teens aren't downloading inappropriate apps.

4️⃣ No more Google Flight search Today, when you do a Google search for "flights from Dublin to Frankfurt," you'll see a helpful box at the top giving you flight search information. But travel companies like Booking.com persuade the EC that this was unfair.

So, even though this tool is useful for European consumers, Google has to scrap it - in the name of delivering more traffic to middlemen sites like Booking.com blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/an-update-on-our-preparations-for-the-dma/

5️⃣ More cluttered Google search results Similarly, sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor successfully lobbied the EU to force Google to redesign its local & travel search pages in order to deliver more traffic to their sites.

As a result of the DMA, Google has to redesign its search results page in 3-4 different ways to include more links to Yelp and TripAdvisor. It's a Yelp Links Welfare program. But as you can see ⬇️ it makes the Google search page more cluttered & complicated for consumers.

6️⃣ Repeats the mistake of Europe’s cookie pop-ups If you like the endless and annoying cookie pop-ups brought to you by Europe's ePrivacy directive, you're going to love the DMA. Because it's going to soon bombard users of integrated services with mandatory opt-in notices.

Right now, services like Instagram & Facebook work smoothly together. On Google, your search history is linked with Chrome and YouTube to make recommendations better. DMA views these integrations with hostility, forcing consumers to periodically opt-in.

There's still a lot we don't know about how other companies are implementing DMA. I'll add to this post as more examples surface. medium.com/chamber-of-progress/europes-digital-market-act-fails-consumers-dcaf70cc548c

But so far, it’s clear that the DMA is making Big Tech services less useful, less secure, less family-friendly, and less useful. Europeans’ experience on Big Tech services is about to get worse compared to the experience of Americans and other non-Europeans.