Amazon’s (AMZN) Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s (MSFT) Azure, and Alphabet’s (GOOG) (GOOGL) Google Cloud risk being pulled into the scope of the EU’s crackdown on big tech as the region’s antitrust agency prepares to evaluate the platforms’ market power, Bloomberg News reported.
The European Commission wants to decide if any of the three should face new restrictions under the region’s Digital Markets Act, DMA, the report added, citing people with knowledge of the matter.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft and the European Commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha.
The plan for a market probe comes on the heels of several major outages in the cloud industry that impacted global services, highlighting the risks of depending on only a few players.
The world’s largest cloud providers have avoided the DMA because a large part of their business comes through enterprise contracts, making it difficult to count the number of individual users, one of the EU’s main benchmarks for earmarking the companies’ services for extra oversight, according to the report.
Under the probe’s remit, regulators will evaluate if the top cloud operators, regardless of the challenge of counting user numbers, should be forced to contend with new obligations, including increased interoperability with competing software and better data portability for users, and restrictions on tying and bundling, the report noted.
Last month, Amazon Web Services experienced a major outage overnight that disrupted several websites, apps and online games.
Microsoft’s Azure was similarly impacted in October which prevented people from checking in for Alaska Airlines flights and halted votes inside the Scottish Parliament. In June, a global Google Cloud outage hit platforms such as Spotify and Discord, the report added.
The DMA is a legislation that establishes a set of objective criteria to qualify a large online platform as a “gatekeeper” and ensure that they behave fairly online and leave room for contestability.
In September 2023, the European Commission designated for the first time six gatekeepers — Alphabet, Amazon (AMZN), Apple, Meta Platforms (META), Microsoft (MSFT) and Chinese tech giant ByteDance (BDNCE) — under the DMA. Certain products provided by these companies come under the DMA and the EU’s Digital Services Act, or DSA — which regulates online intermediaries and platforms that millions of Europeans use every day. The DSA protects consumers and their rights online.