[PaulHoule]

I think messaging is an area where Europe could have an impact.

The basic problem with messaging and voice/video comm applications is that clients are not interoperable. It is easy to think that: we've had CUSeeMe, IRC, ICU, AOL Instant Messenger, Tivejo, MSN Messenger, I think more than 10 kinds of Google Chat, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Zoom, Paltalk, Yahoo Messenger, Signal, Telegram, Go2Meeting, Discord, WhatsApp, WeChat, etc.

The average person would be hard pressed to tell the difference between these applications, a cynic would say "Facebook Messenger is no different from AOL Instance|MSN|Yahoo messenger except it is integrated with Facebook". The average person doesn't question that chat programs don't interoperate but because they don't we see a pattern of "try out the new shiny, it's just as good as the old cruddy was back in the day", the new application rides high for a while, then it rots and it is it the new old cruddy before long. The one constant is that you may need to install 10 chat applications to talk to everybody you talk to.

As it is, two-sided markets let applications coast and generally rot without losing market share until things get catastrophically bad. If chat applications interoperated there would be a robust market for better applications and better servers and you'd see developers of old apps to have a reason to keep them working over time and more chances for new apps to get established.

[Muehe]

Curiously many of the messengers you mentioned are or were at least initially based on the same protocol, XMPP, some of them even were interoperable for a time[0]. There are still attempts at realising interoperability, notably libpurple[1], but they are fighting a constant uphill battle. Sadly companies usually just have more incentives to either keep their services walled off or extend only theirs in functionality, rather then keeping them interoperable. This would only change through regulation, or I suppose if a federated service gains enough traction to become the de-facto standard, but given the fate of XMPP that seems unlikely.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#Non-native_deployments

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software)

[stevehawk]

The impact is not likely to be positive. Nearly every government in Europe will want access to the comms happening, particularly if it's within their borders or with their citizens. Europe is not likely to introduce an end-user-to-end-user encryption. It will be encrypted from end user to the government to the next end user.

[EMIRELADERO]

The EU's DMA regulation, which is the one that will enforce interoperability, explicitly requires end-to-end encryption to be preserved.

[inglor_cz]

At the same time, EU tries to introduce Chat Control, which would emasculate E2E by exfiltrating the content of the conversation anyway.

[EMIRELADERO]

It is helpful to avoid thinking of any legislative body as a monolith.

[stevehawk]

and as facebook and governments have taught us, a lot of people consider end to end encryption to include "i can encrpyt between you and my server, decrypt it, read it, encrypt it again and pass it on".