Interoperability could stifle innovation, Vice Commission President Margrethe Vestager fears in an interview with Handelsblatt. “Think of the SMS: it has been around for a very long time, and it has hardly developed any further.” If you stipulate that messengers must be compatible, this could lead to a kind of SMS being returned.
Vestager speaks in the interview but also from a different approach: “We want to stipulate that several app stores can be installed on one mobile phone. But we do not go so far that these stores have to be compatible with each other.” Unlike the Commission, the EU Parliament is building on interoperability for Messenger. This can be regulated, for example, in the Digital Service Act. The SPD also called for interfaces to be disclosed as early as 2018. “The magic word is interoperability,” said then Federal Justice Minister Katarina Barley.
Meanwhile, Facebook knows how to use interoperability for its own purposes. Services such as Messenger and Instagram can already communicate with each other – but this could not only benefit the consumer, but should also make it more difficult to break up the group.
Differences between the EU, USA and China
Vestager also expects that European companies will get a chance to assert themselves “in the digitization of industry” – against the big companies from the USA. Laws should ensure that. The EU has always tended to regulate, while the US sets borders through legal proceedings. “Both approaches can complement each other well.” The Vice Commissioner is therefore also hoping for an alliance with the USA – a transatlantic council for trade and technology. System rivalries also play a role here. China is much more ambitious and more global. “Technology is very important in this system competition because it is central to the functioning of authoritarian regimes.”
Referring to 5G, Vestager explains that it does not consider all Chinese tech companies to be high-risk providers. The interview also deals with cultural differences between the EU and the US, among other things with regard to start-ups and investments. She calls the balance between data protection and the use of a vaccination pass “squaring the circle”.
