The EU Commission opens an investigation into AWS and Azure to determine whether they should fall under the DMA and says they “occupy very strong positions”
Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp.'s Azure are under investigation by the European Union to determine whether …
Context & Ripple Effects
The inquiry follows reports that the Commission was considering whether AWS, Azure and Google Cloud warranted DMA restrictions after major cloud outages. It also extends a broader competition-policy thread: UK regulator Ofcom had previously flagged possible limits on cloud competition involving the same major providers.
Later preliminary EU findings identifying Azure and AWS as the two largest cloud services show why this opening investigation matters: the Commission is testing whether cloud infrastructure should be treated as a core platform bottleneck, not merely a business-to-business service.
First-order effects
- AWS and Azure face a formal EU assessment of whether their market positions bring them within the DMA, putting their cloud commercial practices and interoperability posture under closer regulatory scrutiny.
- The Commission gains a route to build the record for a possible designation; no new DMA obligations are imposed merely by the investigation.
Second-order effects
- Enterprise customers and cloud rivals gain a regulatory forum for concerns about switching, access and provider terms, while AWS and Azure must defend the competitiveness of those arrangements.
- Google Cloud remains relevant to the policy debate because the Commission had considered its status alongside AWS and Azure, even though this investigation names the latter two.
Third-order effects
- If cloud providers are brought into DMA oversight, EU digital-market enforcement would reach further down the stack from consumer platforms into the infrastructure on which digital services and AI workloads run.
- The parallel UK scrutiny, including Ofcom's competition concerns about the three largest cloud providers, suggests cloud-market contestability is becoming a durable regulatory issue rather than a one-off inquiry.
The trend: European competition authorities are increasingly treating concentrated cloud infrastructure as strategic digital-market plumbing that may require platform-style oversight.