Digital Markets Act: Now it’s the clouds’ turn
The European Commission appears to be classifying AWS and Azure as gatekeepers – according to Bloomberg, official confirmation is expected next week. What does this mean?
For a good six months now, the major US cloud providers have been under scrutiny by the EU. Under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, the authorities aim to determine whether particularly large cloud providers – most of which are based in the USA – should be classified as market-dominant firms (gatekeepers). The focus is specifically on Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure services. Now Bloomberg reports that a decision has been reached. Both services have been classified as gatekeepers. An official statement from the European Commission is due to follow next week.
The investigation was prompted not only by the services’ market position, but also by the sometimes critical outages that had a significant impact on IT infrastructure. Take Azure, for example, whose outage caused problems with parliamentary votes and flight operations – not to mention the major Masterkey-Gate 2023. Or a 15-hour AWS outage that resulted in Docker, Signal, Epic and Atlassian ceasing to function.
What would the ‘gatekeeper’ classification change?
If the information from Bloomberg is accurate, Amazon and Microsoft would have to prepare for additional obligations: easier data portability, open interfaces to rival services and restrictions on the bundling of their own products. Preferential treatment of their own software would also be prohibited. Violations would result in heavy fines based on the companies’ global turnover. Nor does the fact that Microsoft has committed to major investments in Europe’s infrastructure.
The companies concerned had previously managed to avoid being classified as gatekeepers, as their business was mostly conducted via corporate contracts. This made it difficult to determine the number of actual users. However, this is crucial for classification as a gatekeeper: 45 million active users in Europe is the critical mass «» . Given that services such as Netflix and Signal are AWS customers, the service in question has long since indirectly reached this number of users.
I've been tinkering with digital networks ever since I found out how to activate both telephone channels on the ISDN card for greater bandwidth. As for the analogue variety, I've been doing that since I learned to talk. Though Winterthur is my adoptive home city, my heart still bleeds red and blue.
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