EU Launches DMA Probes: Is Gatekeeper Status Next for AWS & Azure Cloud?

According to the European Commission, three investigations will be launched into cloud-computing services under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, including an assessment of whether Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure should be designated as gatekeepers. Although their scale and market position do not yet meet the DMA’s formal criteria, regulators argue that AWS and Azure may nonetheless function as crucial intermediaries between businesses and consumers.

A second market inquiry will examine whether the DMA can address practices that may undermine competition and fairness within Europe’s cloud sector, where EU-based providers lag behind their U.S. counterparts.

The Commission is gathering information from market participants to determine whether the DMA’s existing obligations are sufficient to address anti-competitive or unfair practices, including interoperability barriers, restricted access to enterprise-user data, bundling, and potentially unfair contractual terms.

If the investigations conclude that AWS and Azure meet the DMA’s criteria for core platform services with gatekeeper characteristics, these cloud services will be added to the list of products and platforms for which Amazon and Microsoft have already been designated as gatekeepers.