ACCESS Act Mandates Major Platforms Open Data and Messaging to Competitors: What It Means for Your Digital Life

The Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching Act of 2025—the ACCESS Act—is a major push to break up the digital walled gardens built by the biggest tech companies. Simply put, this bill requires the largest communications platforms (those with over 100 million U.S. users that profit from your data) to make it easy for you to take your data and communicate with people on rival services. It mandates two core technical requirements: portability (moving your data) and interoperability (communicating across platforms). The goal is to give consumers more choice and to give smaller competitors a fair shot at breaking into the market. This isn't just about Facebook or Twitter; it hits any communications platform that fits the size and data monetization criteria (Sec. 2).

Your Data, Your Exit Strategy

Think of portability like moving your entire digital life—photos, posts, contacts, messages—from one massive platform to another, without having to manually download and re-upload everything. Under Section 3, large platforms must maintain interfaces that allow you, or a competing service you authorize, to securely transfer your user data in a standard, machine-readable format. This is huge because right now, your data is often locked in proprietary formats, making it nearly impossible to switch services without losing years of content. For the busy professional who relies on one platform for networking, this means less fear of being locked in if a better, newer service comes along. However, there’s a catch: if a large platform offers a specific product or service where they don't make money from collecting, using, or selling your data, that specific service is completely exempt from these portability rules (Sec. 3, Sec. 4).

Breaking the Walled Garden: Interoperability

Interoperability is perhaps the most ambitious part of the bill (Sec. 4). It means that if you’re using Platform A, you should be able to seamlessly communicate with your friend who is only on Platform B. The big platforms must maintain accessible interfaces so users of competing services can communicate with their users. This means the days of needing five different messaging apps just to talk to your contacts might be numbered. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is tasked with developing model technical standards within 180 days to help make this happen, focusing on popular services like messaging and social networks (Sec. 6(c)).

While this sounds great for competition, the large platforms can set "reasonable limits" on how often competitors access their systems and charge proportional fees for excessive use (Sec. 4(c)). This is a potential gray area; platforms could use these fees or limits to slow down or discourage competition, even though the bill requires the charges to be proportional to the actual cost and risk. If the platform changes its interface to intentionally undermine a competitor’s access, that counts as breaking the rules.

The Digital Power of Attorney

Section 5 introduces delegatability, which allows you to officially authorize a “custodial third-party agent” to manage your account settings, posts, and interactions as if they were you. Think of this as a digital power of attorney. This is particularly relevant for small business owners who want to outsource social media management or for families managing the accounts of elderly relatives. These agents must register with the FCC, which has 180 days to establish rules for verifying that the user genuinely authorized the agent. Crucially, the agent is strictly prohibited from using your data for their own commercial gain—they can only charge you a fee for their service (Sec. 5(d)).

Enforcement and the Loopholes

Enforcement falls primarily to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which will treat violations as unfair or deceptive business practices under the FTC Act (Sec. 6(e)). The FTC must also set up a system to handle complaints from users and competing providers. However, two elements need close attention. First, the explicit exemption for any service where the platform doesn't monetize user data could be a significant loophole, allowing platforms to shift features to non-monetized services to avoid compliance. Second, the bill includes a federal preemption clause, meaning this federal law overrides any conflicting state laws (Sec. 6(f)). If your state has stronger existing data portability or platform access laws, the federal law could potentially weaken those protections if they are deemed to be in direct conflict.