Under the investigation’s remit, regulators will asses whether top cloud operators like AWS and Azure should be forced to contend with a raft of fresh obligations including increased interoperability with rival software and better data portability for users, as well as restrictions on tying and bundling. — AFP
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Corp’s Azure, and Alphabet Inc’s Google Cloud risk being dragged into the scope of the European Union’s crackdown on Big Tech as antitrust watchdogs prepare to study the platforms’ market power.
The European Commission wants to decide if any of the trio should face a raft of new restrictions under the bloc’s Digital Markets Act, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity. The plan for a market probe follows several major outages in the cloud industry that wrought havoc across global services, highlighting the risks of relying on a mere handful of players.
To date, the world’s largest cloud providers have avoided the DMA because a large part of their business comes via enterprise contracts, making it difficult to count the number of individual users, one of the EU’s main benchmarks for earmarking Silicon Valley services for extra oversight.
Under the investigation’s remit, regulators will asses whether the top cloud operators – regardless of the challenge of counting user numbers – should be forced to contend with a raft of fresh obligations including increased interoperability with rival software and better data portability for users, as well as restrictions on tying and bundling.
The commission and Microsoft declined to comment. AWS and Google didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The DMA came onto the EU’s books in 2023 and is designed to clip the wings of the world’s largest technology platforms with a slew of dos and don’ts. The rules haven’t yet been wielded against any major cloud providers, who have taken sizable chunks of the market.
Just last month, Amazon’s reputation as a reliable provider of cloud services took a hit when an outage lasting some 15 hours disrupted the operations of hundreds of companies, ranging from Apple Inc to McDonald’s Corp to Epic Games Inc.
Microsoft’s Azure similarly was hit by troubles in October that 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 Technology SA and Discord Inc.
Should the cloud services eventually be found to come under the scope of the rules, penalties for violations can be hefty. So far, Apple and Meta Platforms Inc have faced the full force of the law, with fines amounting to €500mil (US$579mil) and €200mil respectively. – Bloomberg
