Today the European Parliament, the European Council and the European Commission will meet again for a discussion about the Digital Markets Act (DMA). This is the second of three of these meetings, appropriately called trilogues, where each party exposes their stance on a proposed law and the group tries to agree on the final version.

The DMA is a groundbreaking step forward in shaking the hold a few gatekeepers have on users and the market, in particular because it looks to (among others):

• Require gatekeepers to allow other services to interoperate with their services
• Prevent them to treat their own services and products more favourably (for example by ranking)
• Require them to allow users to uninstall any pre-installed software or app

The interoperability obligation is obviously the one on which we’ve kept a particularly close eye, as if it lands well it could take the success of Matrix to the next level completely overnight.

However, whilst in our mind interoperability automatically implies “open standard”, there are actually different ways of implementing it, depending on how far one wants to go. Typical debates here have been between whether to force gatekeepers to maintain open and well documented APIs, or whether to go full swing and mandate an open standard, and every shade in between.

We’ve been lucky to have had the opportunity to talk to policy advisors from different European member states, and it has been pretty fascinating to realise that it was always the same arguments which were being presented back at us, straight from the gatekeepers partyline.

We’ve ended up just listing them in a quick, high level, Myth Debunking exercise and thought it would be useful to actually publish them for everyone to access, so here they are!

• MYTH #1 – “It is impossible to have a standard that is open, decentralized and secure at the same time”
  ⇒ false: HTTPS did it, Matrix did it.
• MYTH #2 –“It is difficult and expensive to make existing services compatible with a standard”
  ⇒ false: Gitter was integrated into Matrix in less than a month, with a single developer
• MYTH #3 – “Interoperability is incompatible with end-to-end encryption”
  ⇒ false: services just have to speak the same language, email has proved this with S/MIME and PGP – where different vendors can and do interoperate with E2EE. It’s even