New rules force big tech to make big changes

Did Europe just change the internet? Starting now, six of the world’s biggest tech companies must fully comply with the Digital Markets Act, a sweeping set of E.U. rules designed to prevent them from stifling competition. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok owner ByteDance have had to implement major changes to the ways their products and services work as part of rules to make the digital economy fairer. These companies may decide to make the updates available globally to keep everyone’s experience consistent, restrict them to the European Union or chart a path into the middle ground.

[Earthesion]

Incredible changes. These are how it should have been from the start.

[gmanley]

From the US: thank you EU, you guys are actually holding these behemouth companies accountable

[sunshinelizard]

Why is it that the EU, which is a democracy, can take care of the people against the Goliaths but the U.S. cannot?

[srepinS]

The EU is always ahead of countries like the US when it comes to laws on the internet.

[bensteinhauser]

Damn, wish my country stood up to tech giants for me. Womp womp

[ad_astra]

And let me guess, because of brexit the UK isn’t adopting the sensible policy?

[yagmomru]

This is all great. Less monopolization is almost always a good thing

[Seb]

This is great. This stops a lot of power holds these companies have.

[TobsterWobbles]

Wild how effective governments can be when they aren't on the payroll of said companies

[anthonylipke]

If these policies can't be universal or generalized to all alternatives this is going to be the same kind of problem Microsoft experienced not being able to integrate web services into Windows while Apple and others were not inhibited.

[awsomegadgetguy]

Why didnt they force imessage to work well with other texts?

[fynnkessels]

The one thing the EU is good at: making regulations for a large enough market that the best business decision for tech companies is to institute the change globally (that's in the rare case where everybody gets their act together)

[somedudenamedzack]

The DMA also forces Micro$oft to allow users to uninstall all of the bloatware in windows like MS edge, the phone link app, etc

[rrwexplov]

Delinking facebook and instagram accounts would be nice

[willkeinnamen]

Nice. As a german, I highly support this. I'm glad the EU fights back monopolism and data exposure

[sephalopod]

I've been able to do that on Android since like Android 11, both on my Google Pixel and my samsung tablet, so I'm confused why they are requiring it, if you can already do it, and it's actually pretty easy

[christopherbernhardt]

Lmao the google one. Whenever you download a new internet app on any android phone, the next time you click a link it pops up with a screen that says "what app would you like to open this in?" And you can select "Just once" or "Always"

I dont think this changes anything for Android

[SJGoesPlaces]

Great. No one should be given such full power

[rileyjoseph]

Normally I’m totally against most stuff they do across the pond, but this needs to happen in America.

[dubgua]

Windows still forces internet explorer in some pages... And yes internet explorer is a default app even in windows 11... And some links are made default on Edge, so you can't