There's just one wrinkle: the Big Tech companies don't want that future, and they're trying their damndest to strangle it in its cradle.
Right from the start, it was obvious that the tech giants were going to war against the DMA, and the freedom it promised to their users.
Take Apple, whose tight control over which software its customers can install was a major concern of the DMA from its inception.
iOS devices will refuse to run software unless it comes from Apple's App Store, and that control over Apple's customers means that Apple can exert tremendous control over app vendors, too.
Apple charges app vendors a whopping 30 percent commission on most transactions, both the initial price of the app and everything you buy from it thereafter.
To maintain those high commissions, Apple also restricts its vendors from informing their customers about the existence of other ways of paying and at various times has also banned its vendors from offering discounts to customers who complete their purchases without using the app.
Apple is adamant that it needs this control to keep its customers safe, but in theory and in practice, Apple has shown that it can protect you without maintaining this degree of control, and that it uses this control to take away your security when it serves the company's profits to do so.
Apple is worth between two and three trillion dollars.
Investors prize Apple's stock in large part due to the tens of billions of dollars it extracts from other businesses that want to reach its customers.
Companies like Apple were given over a year to prepare for the DMA, and were told to produce compliance plans by March of this year.
Apple's compliance plan falls very short of the mark: between a blizzard of confusing junk fees and onerous conditions, the plan in no way satisfies the EU's goal of fostering competition in app stores.
That's just scratching the surface of Apple's absurd proposal: Apple's customers will have to successfully navigate a maze of deeply buried settings just to try another app store, and Apple will disable all your third-party apps if you take your phone out of the EU for 30 days.
The DMA includes new enforcement tools to finally apply the General Data Privacy Regulation to US tech giants.
Just like Apple, Meta is behaving as though the DMA permits it to carry on its worst behavior, with minor cosmetic tweaks around the margins.
Just like Apple, Meta is daring the EU to enforce its democratically enacted laws, implicitly promising to pit its billions against Europe's institutions to preserve its right to spy on us.
After decades of regulatory indifference to tech monopolization, competition authorities all over the world are taking on Big Tech.
If the EU successfully forces tech to play fair, it will serve as a starting gun for a global race to the top, in which tech's ill-gotten gains - of data, power and money - will be returned to the users and workers from whom that treasure came.
They've announced investigations into Apple, Google and Meta, threatening fines of 10 percent of the companies' global income, which will double to 20 percent if the companies don't toe the line.
It's not just Big Tech that's playing for all the marbles - it's also the systems of democratic control and accountability.
If Apple can sabotage the DMA's insistence on taking away its veto over its customers' software choices, that will spill over into the US Department of Justice's case over the same issue, as well as the cases in Japan and South Korea, and the pending enforcement action in the UK..
This Cyber News was published on www.eff.org. Publication date: Mon, 13 May 2024 17:43:04 +0000