Is it just me or is there not actual meat to this article? Like what specifically are the rules at issue here?

The "Digital Services Act" effectively takes the divisive dark money out of advertising and requires more than minimum-effort moderation, affecting Meta and X:

- bans targeted advertising based on a person’s sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, or political beliefs and puts restrictions on targeting ads to children

- requires transparency on content algorithms and advertising

- requires online platforms prevent and remove posts containing illegal goods, services, or content in a timely fashion

The "Digital Markets Act" requires interoperability and competition:

- requires Apple to allow competing app stores, very contentious for Apple who invented a stack of fees for this

- requires Apple and Google to allow apps to freely use 3rd party payments, this is very contentious for Apple and they still charge for doing so

- allow 3rd parties interoperability, eg headphones and smartwatches for Apple and messaging clients for Meta, this is starting to improve

- allow removal of preinstalled apps, settings of new defaults, this is largely done although malicious compliance has kept rival browsers at bay on iPhone

Digital Services Act / Digital Markets Act (similar in spirit, but one targets online stores like Google Play, another one online services like Instagram more generally)

More specifically, both are already in effect, outlawing certain things, and designating certain companies as "digital gatekeepers" when they reach a certain threshold of users within the EU.

These regulations don't really specify what every gatekeeper needs to actually do (above the bare minimum), but say that once a company is designated as a gatekeeper, corrective action to prevent their monopolistic behaviour are going to be decided on a case-by-case basis. In practice this means that corrective actions can be something very significant (like iOS having to ask EU users to set a default browser during device setup instead of defaulting to Safari) or nothing, which is why this direct line of conversation shows spinelessness.

It's pretty much an equivalent of a judge having open discussions with a criminal about how the court should interpret the law to suit the criminal better.