Preliminary findings: the EU says Azure and AWS are “the largest and second largest” cloud services in the EU, as the bloc weighs up tougher DMA oversight
Microsoft Corp.'s Azure and Amazon Web Services face tough European Union guardrails after regulators said they should be targeted by the bloc's Digital Markets Act.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Commission’s preliminary view follows its November investigation into whether AWS and Azure should be brought within the Digital Markets Act, after identifying their very strong market positions. Reporting in June had already signaled that a finding was imminent.
The move also sits alongside UK competition scrutiny: Ofcom referred the cloud market to the CMA, whose provisional findings said competition was not working well for customers and identified AWS and Azure as holding roughly 40% each of that market.
First-order effects
- Azure and AWS now face a materially higher likelihood of DMA designation and the associated obligations, with the Commission explicitly identifying them as the EU’s two largest cloud-service providers.
- European cloud customers and rivals gain a clearer regulatory basis to challenge practices that may make switching providers or using competing services harder.
Second-order effects
- AWS and Azure will have incentives to reassess EU-specific commercial, interoperability, and customer-mobility practices before any final DMA obligations take effect.
- Google Cloud, which was included in the Commission’s earlier scope-setting discussion but is not named in the preliminary ranking, may seek to position itself as a competitive alternative while also facing continued scrutiny in the broader cloud market.
Third-order effects
- If designation proceeds, cloud infrastructure would become a more central DMA test case, extending the regime’s practical reach from consumer-facing platforms into enterprise technology markets.
- Parallel EU and UK inquiries could reinforce a regulatory focus on cloud concentration and customer switching conditions, though the eventual remedies and their market impact remain unresolved.
The trend: European competition authorities are increasingly treating concentrated cloud infrastructure as strategic digital-market infrastructure warranting platform-style oversight.