The European Commission’s ‘Six-Seven’ Theory of Interoperability
If you have been near anyone under the age of 15 in the past year, you may have heard the phrase “six seven” shouted with great conviction and no discernible content. It usually comes with a hand gesture. It means, as best anyone can tell, absolutely nothing. That is the joke: a number pair masquerading as communication, repeated so often that the repetition becomes the point.
In Brussels, Article 6(7) of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) has begun to suffer a similar fate. The DMA is the European Union’s flagship law for regulating large digital platforms, which it calls “gatekeepers.” Article 6(7) is supposed to require those gatekeepers to make certain hardware and software features interoperable—that is, usable by rival services—while still allowing them to protect security, privacy, and system integrity.
Increasingly, though, the provision gets invoked with great solemnity in every new specification proceeding the European Commission opens, while its actual content keeps shifting to mean whatever the Commission needs in a given case. The trajectory of enforcement—from Apple’s iOS connected-devices proceedings last year to the current Google Android artificial-intelligence (AI) proceedings—suggests the Commission increasingly treats Article 6(7) less like a legal text with an internal structure and more like a slogan: interoperability now, for everyone, on whatever terms the Commission prefers.
That is unfortunate, because Article 6(7) is not a blank check. It has two distinct halves. The provision requires gatekeepers to provide “effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same hardware and software features” enjoyed by their own services. But it also expressly permits integrity measures that are “strictly necessary and proportionate.” Recital 50 of the DMA confirms that integrity-preserving measures are a legitimate part of implementing Article 6(7), not a loophole to be sheepishly apologized for after the fact.
Properly read, the provision establishes a balancing test, not a maximalist openness mandate. “Effective” does not mean “identical,” and “identical” does not mean “unlimited.”
The Commission’s enforcement to date has steadily read the second half of the provision out of existence. The result is weaker security, less inter-platform competition, and a regulatory tool that increasingly puts a thumb on the scale in the rapidly unfolding generative-AI race, often to the detriment of European consumers.