Open Source, Interoperability and the Digital Markets Act - Vittorio Bertola - FOSDEM 2021

The Internet originally thrived on interoperable services - until the "walled gardens" came. The European Commission recently proposed new regulations (DSA/DMA/DGA) to protect democracy and restore openness and competition. The talk will introduce them and their economic and political background; it will then focus on a specific point, the requirement for dominant platforms to interoperate with third parties, though only in limited cases, using messaging and social media as example. A few decades ago, the Internet was open, interoperable and based on federated services that allowed everyone to cooperate and deploy new content and services: email is the classic example. Then, consolidation happened: the talk will show a common European perspective of how we ended up with a concentration of money and power of unseen scale in the history of mankind, which perpetuates itself by adopting the "walled garden" service model. The best example of this model is instant messaging, where people ha