Two new ‘gatekeepers’ could be added to the long list of platforms affected by the Digital Markets Act (DMA). On Tuesday 18 November, the European Commission announced that it had opened two investigations to determine whether the two cloud services offered by Amazon and Microsoft - Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure - should be added to the list of core services for which the two digital giants are already subject to the most stringent obligations of the DMA (see EUROPE 13244/3 and EUROPE 13366/38).
The Commission must determine whether or not the two cloud services act as important ‘gateways’ between businesses and consumers, and whether their omnipresence limits the existence of a competitive market: the American cloud providers have around two-thirds of the market share in the European Union.
At this stage, neither of the two services meets the criteria for size, number of users and market position set by the DMA to be considered as genuine ‘gatekeepers’.
Google Cloud, Europe’s third largest provider of cloud services, is not currently under investigation. “Our preliminary evidence shows that Google is playing a less important role for now on our market” than Amazon and Microsoft, said Thomas Regnier, EU spokesman for digital affairs.
If, at the end of its investigation, the Commission considers that Microsoft and Amazon’s cloud services meet the conditions for designation under the DMA, the two digital giants would then have six months to ensure that their services are compliant. The institution hopes to conclude these investigations within a year.
On the same day, the Commission opened a third, more general market inquiry to assess whether the current DMA obligations can be applied to anti-competitive or unfair practices in the cloud services sector.
The investigation is intended to examine barriers to service interoperability, limited or conditional access to data for professional users, linked and bundled services and potentially unbalanced contractual clauses.
According to an AWS spokesperson quoted by AFP, the Commission’s investigation should demonstrate that “the cloud computing sector is extremely dynamic, with companies enjoying lots of choice, unprecedented innovation opportunity, and low costs”, and that subjecting cloud operators to the DMA could risk “stifling invention or raising costs for European companies”.
Earlier in the month, the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) published a study on the perceived effects of the DMA, eighteen months after it came into force (see EUROPE 13748/17).
At the time, the organisation criticised the poor integration of new technologies such as AI and cloud services into the scope of the regulation. (Original version in French by Isalia Stieffatre)