Apple and Google’s COVID-19 Tool is “Interoperable.” What Does That Mean?

As governments, companies, and civil society evaluate methods for helping to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, some are turning to a proposal from Apple and Google to boost contact tracing efforts. The companies announced at the beginning of April that they were working together to develop a cross-platform mechanism for COVID-19 “exposure notification.” Their proposal enables devices to recognize when people are within a few meters of each other, and to let the owner know if someone they were close to later tested positive for COVID-19—all without revealing any names or other permanent identifiers to anyone. There’s been much discussion since then analyzing the privacy impacts of electronic exposure notification tools, how much they could actually add to the public health fight against the disease, and how a system relying on smartphones has inherent and systemic biases against people of color and low-income people. Those issues are important, and OTI has been analyzing and speaking out about many of them. But an interesting detail that has seen less discussion is that the companies promoted their new system as “interoperable.”

That is a welcome choice of words from both companies right now, as discussions about data interoperability between online services have been a focus for policymakers in Washington, D.C. and around the world over the past 18 months. The fundamental issue is whether and how the government should encourage or require internet platforms to enable their services to interoperate with those of their competitors. Apple and Google pointing to this feature of their proposal is a great opportunity to examine interoperability more closely.

What is interoperability? Why might it be useful to regulators? How does it affect competition and consumer well-being? OTI released a paper last month that explores these and other related questions.

As we wrote then, interoperability is “the ability for disparate computer systems and services to interact and exchange data.” This could refer to something as simple as sending an email from Microsoft’s Outlook365 to someone at Google’s Gmail or diving down a Wikipedia rabbithole at a coffee shop, or to something as complicated as ActivityPub—the social network protocol that is the plumbing for the microblogging tool Mastodon, along with a host of other innovative platforms. Interoperability is everywhere around the internet, once you know to start looking for it. Even the name of the “internet” reflects the fact that its basic purpose is to connect together many different networks so they can all interoperate.

So, why are Google and Apple promoting their COVID-19 exposure notification solution as interoperable? It may be an effort to overcome the mental image that many in the public have that iOS and Android are fundamentally incompatible platforms. Of course, any exposure notification system would be immediately hamstrung if half of the mobile handsets in the world couldn’t track exposures with the other half. Emphasizing that the system was interoperable across both companies’ platforms could have been an attempt to forestall criticism on those counts.

It is also good to see interoperability touted as an important feature, because while the protocols that run the internet at a fundamental level still exemplify interoperability, the new services that companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Twitter have developed largely do not. Facebook users can’t follow friends on Twitter through Facebook, and you can’t make a video call from Google Meet to Apple’s Facetime. This pattern continues all over the internet’s large platforms (and, to be fair, some of the smaller ones as well).

At the same time, many of these large companies are currently drawing attention from competition regulators in the United States and around the world. Interoperability could be a crucial tool for promoting competition in online marketplaces. Our paper provides a guide to regulators and policymakers on the functions of interoperability, and why, if companies fight against it or undermine it, regulators should view it as a sign of anti-competitive behavior. We also suggest ways regulators can look to interoperability when considering how to use their authorities most effectively.

For example, if a regulator is investigating a company for potential antitrust violations, the fact that the company took steps to make interoperating with their platform harder or impossible may be important evidence of anti-competitive behavior. On the other hand, in negotiations with a company over an ongoing regulatory action, regulators can and should demand that companies make their platforms more open and interoperable in concrete and measurable ways. In any case, having a strong working knowledge of interoperability and how it works will be valuable for policymakers in the future.

These considerations may have also contributed to Apple and Google’s choice to use the particular term “interoperable” in their public descriptions of their exposure notification interface. In this context, the companies were using the term to explain that the system would work on and between both iOS and Android; a fundamentally necessary feature for the entire concept to succeed. We at OTI certainly hope that the spirit of interoperability learned during this pandemic continues going forward, and we’ll be working hard to make that happen.