The European Commission wants to investigate whether Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud fall under the Digital Markets Act. After large-scale cloud outages, concerns are growing about the dominance of three major players in the cloud market.
This is according to Bloomberg, based on sources. The investigation follows several major outages in the cloud sector. Last month, an Amazon services outage affected hundreds of companies. Apple, McDonald’s, Epic Games, and other multinationals experienced problems for up to 15 hours. In October, an Azure outage even prevented Alaska Airlines passengers from checking in and the Scottish Parliament from voting. Google Cloud went down in June, causing Spotify and Discord to fail.
Investigation into market power
The European Commission is preparing an investigation into the market power of the three major cloud providers. Until now, they have escaped scrutiny because a large part of their revenue comes from enterprise contracts, which makes it difficult to count individual users—an important metric for the DMA.
Regulators want to assess whether the three cloud players should be required to provide greater interoperability with rival software and better data portability for customers. Restrictions on bundling services may also be imposed.
The Digital Markets Act came into force in 2023 to curb the power of large technology platforms. So far, the rules have mainly focused on consumer platforms. Apple has already been fined €500 million, while Meta has been fined €200 million.
The Commission, Microsoft, AWS, and Google have not yet responded to the reports about the investigation. Whether the cloud players fall under the DMA will be determined by the investigation to be conducted in the coming period.