The Ftc Warns Big Tech Companies Not to Apply the Digital Services Act

US companies should not be subject to extraterritoriality applied by non-US entities. If EU want to charge and / or change Big Tech, they should create their own digital companies in their sovereign tech eco-system which might be interconnected and interoperable with the US and China internets.

If the laws in different jurisdictions are incompatible (for example with end-to-end encryption, which is either “end-to-end” or “not-end-to-end”) then the product offering that service will simply have to be different in the two jurisdictions.

I know that Apple, for example, has iCloud and iCloud-in-china. Seems like a pain to manage, but they could presumably offer iCloud-in-Europe and iCloud-in-UK (though the UK seem to have backed off with their demands now).

Where it becomes interesting is for interaction, if an EU person tries to (for example) use e2e-iMessage to a US person or vice-versa. With this decision, does the service simply disallow the message if the jurisdictions disagree on the definition of E2E ?

What about things like Gmail’s escrowed private keys in email ? Where the Gmail server owns the private keys (so the server can provide search etc. on encrypted email). This isn’t E2E by a strict definition, it’s only “almost” E2E and “almost: doesn’t cut it, but if the server can’t read the email, you lose a lot of Gmail functionality…

I was surprised by the FTC taking a stand but then read the following:

“The Digital Services Act (DSA) is an EU regulation that aims to create a safer online environment by holding digital platforms accountable for illegal content and *disinformation*.”