Europe is preparing to rewrite the rules of the Internet

Next week, a law will go into effect that will change the Internet forever and make it a lot harder to be a tech giant. On November 1, the European Union Digital Markets Act goes into effect, starting a countdown to a process expected to force Amazon, Google and Meta to make their platforms more open and interoperable by 2023. In a new reminder that Europe has regulated tech companies much more heavily than the US, it could bring major changes to what people can do with their devices and apps.

“We expect the impact to be significant,” says Gerard de Graaf, a veteran EU official who helped pass the DMA earlier this year. Last month, he became director of the EU’s new office in San Francisco, set up in part to explain the law’s implications to big tech companies. De Graaf says they will be forced to break down their walled gardens.

“If you have an iPhone, you should be able to download apps not only from the App Store, but also from other app stores or from the Internet,” de Graaf says in an emerald green-accented conference room at the Irish Consulate in San Francisco. . , where the EU office was originally located. DMA requires dominant platforms to allow smaller competitors, and could force Meta’s WhatsApp to receive messages from rival apps like Signal or Telegram, or prevent Amazon, Apple and Google from favoring their own apps and services.

Although the DMA goes into effect next week, tech platforms don’t have to comply immediately. The EU must first decide which companies are large and entrenched enough to be classified as “gatekeepers” under the strictest rules. De Graaf expects about a dozen companies to join this group, which will be announced in the spring. Those goalies will then have six months to come into compliance.

De Graaf predicted wave of lawsuits is defying Europe’s new rules for Big Tech, but says it’s in California to let Silicon Valley giants know the rules have changed. EU earlier heavy fines were levied against Google, Apple and others via antitrust investigations, a mechanism that puts the burden of proof on bureaucrats, he says. According to the DMA, the onus is on businesses to get in line. “The main message is that the negotiations are over, we’re in a compliance situation,” says de Graaf. “You may not like it, but that’s the way it is.”

As EU digital privacy law, GDPRThe DMA is expected to change the way technology platforms serve people outside the EU’s 400 million Internet users, because some details of compliance will be easier to implement globally.

Tech companies will also soon have to contend with a second sweeping EU law Digital Services Actwhich requires risk assessments of certain algorithms and disclosures about automated decision-making and could force social apps like TikTok open your data to third party control. The law will also be implemented in phases, with the largest online platforms expected to be in compliance by mid-2024. EU too considering the adoption of special rules for artificial intelligencewhich may prohibit some use cases of the technology.

De Graaf argues that tougher rules for tech giants are needed not only to protect people and other businesses from unfair practices, but also to ensure that society can reap the full benefits of technology. He was critical of optionality The AI ​​Bill of Rights recently unveiled by the White House, saying that a lack of strong regulation could undermine public trust in technology. “If our citizens lose trust in AI because they believe it discriminates against them and produces outcomes that are detrimental to their lives,” he says, “they will avoid AI, and it will never succeed.”

The new EU office opens following recent moves by the bloc and the US to work more closely together on technology policy. De Graaf says both sides are interested in finding ways to address the chip shortage and ways authoritarian governments can use technology and the Internet.

He’s also planning a trip to Sacramento to meet with California state lawmakers, who he says have been pioneers in standing up to Big Tech. They are passed the bill last month requiring strict default privacy settings for children and controls over how companies use the data they collect about children. In recent years, the US Congress has passed relatively few laws affecting the technology industry, except $52 billion CHIPS and Semiconductor Manufacturing Support Science Act in July.

Marlena Wisniak, who leads technology work at the civil liberties group at the European Center for Non-Commercial Law, sees the EU’s new presence in the tech industry’s backyard as new evidence that it is serious about shaping global technology policy. She says de Graaf should use some of that power to benefit people who depend on Big Tech platforms outside the US and EU, who are rarely represented in tech diplomacy.

Wisniak also hopes that the EU’s digital emissaries can avoid the pitfalls that have thwarted the plans of some earlier upstarts in Silicon Valley, a place where CEOs, entrepreneurs and investors far outnumber policy experts. “I hope that EU politicians will not be blinded by the technological hype,” she says. “The tech bro story is real.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.