Brussels moves to put AWS and Azure under its toughest tech rules
The European Commission told Amazon and Microsoft that it takes the preliminary view that their cloud arms, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, should be designated as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act.
The wording matters more than it looks. Neither service meets the DMA’s quantitative thresholds. Brussels wants them in anyway.
That is the unusual part. The DMA was built around hard numbers, turnover, user counts, the kind of figures that decide automatically whether a company is a gatekeeper. AWS and Azure clear none of the cloud-specific bars.
The Commission has reached for the regulation’s qualitative route instead, arguing in its preliminary findings that the two services are an “important gateway” between businesses and their customers in the EU regardless of where the thresholds fall.
If the designation holds, AWS and Azure, the largest and second-largest cloud providers in the bloc, would face the DMA’s now-familiar obligations: no self-preferencing,...
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