I work on an opensource ssh server, so I don't think that it really matters if it were to somehow be affected by the DMA, as its an open standard and interoperates with opensource options, which hasn't killed the company I work for.

If discord cant compete with email because its too hard to comply with open standards, maybe that particular rent seeking chat app wasn't actually all that innovative

Email is good for a very particular set of things. Those things (including the way it is open and standardized) also make it very very bad for a lot of other things.

For example, I don't need a spam filter on my discord. My signal is actually encrypted reasonably and provides reliably secure communication. I can send things like gifs and emoji in-line in a reliable, cross-platform way. Group communication isn't cursed, "top- or bottom- posting" isn't a thing people discuss.

Requiring people to build only on widely accepted standards prevents any kind of innovation in features, because before you can ratify anything, you have to get it approved by everyone else, which means that you're now in a land of super-ultra-waterfall design-by-committee that gives everyone the least-common-denominator communication features. That isn't good.