The European Commission’s first review of the Digital Markets Act landed with a whimper for anyone hoping social networking would join messaging on the list of services Big Tech must open up. According to EFF Deeplinks, the Commission decided in April not to extend interoperability mandates to platforms like Facebook and TikTok, offering neither a deadline nor an enforcement timeline—just a promise to keep watching how things develop.
For data-industry players, this is a decision about market structure as much as user rights. Interoperability mandates are the regulatory lever that could let independent apps, decentralized networks, and privacy-forward competitors actually compete for social data and attention without demanding users sacrifice their entire social graph to switch. By declining to force that opening, the Commission leaves incumbent platforms holding both the data and the network effects that make switching costs prohibitive—precisely the dynamic the DMA was built to dismantle.
The complexity excuse doesn’t hold up
The Commission’s stated rationale—insufficient demand and excessive technical complexity—sits awkwardly next to the fact that the DMA already imposes interoperability on messaging services, a domain with its own thorny encryption and privacy tradeoffs. Protocols like ActivityPub, powering Mastodon and the broader Fediverse, demonstrate that decentralized social interoperability isn’t a hypothetical; it’s running in production today. Regulators don’t need to mandate a specific protocol, but requiring interoperable outcomes is well within reach, and the demand argument is circular: users can’t demonstrate appetite for alternatives that gatekeepers have made functionally inaccessible.
A wait-and-see posture from the enforcer is itself a policy choice, and it’s one that favors whoever already controls the gate.
This punt lands alongside other signs that gatekeepers are treating DMA compliance as a negotiating exercise rather than an obligation. Apple’s rival app store terms reportedly carry fees and conditions that make real competition impractical, and Meta’s consent-or-pay model for EU users raises its own compliance questions that remain under review. Taken together, the pattern suggests gatekeepers are betting that slow-walking and litigation will outlast regulatory patience—a bet the Commission’s April decision does little to discourage.
Watch for whether the upcoming EU Digital Fairness Act picks up where this review left off, particularly on pay-for-privacy schemes, and whether the Commission’s ongoing investigations into Apple and Meta produce enforcement with teeth rather than more monitoring. For data companies building on openness and portability, the message for now is that the EU’s biggest pro-competition tool still has a social-networking-shaped hole in it.
The Commission said 'there is no clear demand' from users and businesses for social networking interoperability and, in any case, it's too technically complex at the moment.
