The Washington Post on the EU’s DMA Folly

The Washington Post editorial board yesterday ( News+ link ), “Why Europe Won’t Have the New Siri: Brussels insists the decision is “ Apple’s and Apple’s only ” and that nothing in its flagship Digital Markets Act forbids the launch. That’s technically true and wholly beside the point. The law requires that the moment Siri AI ships in Europe, any rival AI agent must get the same sweeping access to a user’s messages, files and chat history. Apple proposed putting in a software security layer to make that safe and offered a phased rollout to build it. According to Apple, the European Commission rejected the proposal . The DMA was supposed to open markets . But its legal logic was born in the era of browsers, app stores and messaging apps. These components can be swapped like batteries. The DMA effectively demands everything to be swappable/interchangeable. So the European Commission is correct that the DMA does not forbid Apple from launching a version of Siri AI, it clearly forbids Apple from launching the version of Siri AI they actually built. Behind all this lies the dream that Europe could be a “ regulatory superpower .” It wanted to create a market too big to skip that would, by virtue of its heft, end up exporting its rules to the rest of the world. That hasn’t worked out. When adapting a product for Europe costs more than European market access is worth, companies no longer comply. They simply leave out the feature. That’s the folly of the DMA, or at least the maximal interpretation of the DMA that the European Commission is pursuing.