Negotiators from the European Parliament and EU member states have reached an agreement on a major regulation aimed at limiting the market domination of US internet behemoths like Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple. At a meeting in Brussels, legislators hammered out a comprehensive list of dos and don’ts that would designate the world’s most recognizable internet behemoths as “gatekeepers” subject to special restrictions.

Reportedly, the “Digital Markets Act” (DMA) is aimed to safeguard consumers and offer rivals a better opportunity to thrive against the world’s most powerful digital juggernauts. It has rushed through the EU’s legislative procedures. The law’s principal goal is to avoid years of procedures and court fights to penalize Big Tech’s monopolistic behavior, which may result in massive penalties but little change in how the companies operate. When fully implemented, the rule would give Brussels unprecedented ability to monitor the giants’ choices, particularly when they use their checkbooks to purchase promising companies.

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On March 24th, the EU’s governing bodies declared that they had achieved an agreement on the Digital Markets Act, the most comprehensive legislation aimed at Big Tech in Europe (DMA). The bill’s main eye-catching provision would force all major digital companies with a market valuation of more than €75 billion and a subscriber base of more than 45 million people in the EU to develop products that are compatible with smaller platforms. For messaging applications, this means allowing end-to-end encrypted services like WhatsApp to coexist with less secure protocols like SMS, which security experts fear would jeopardize hard-won achievements in message encryption.

The DMA’s major focus is on a group of large digital corporations known as “gatekeepers,” which are defined by the size of their audience or income and, as a result, the structural influence they have over smaller rivals. The government hopes that the new restrictions would “break open” some of the services supplied by such organizations, allowing smaller enterprises to compete. Allowing users to install third-party applications outside of the App Store, allowing outside vendors to rank better in Amazon searches, and mandating messaging programs to exchange texts over different protocols are all possibilities.

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