Commission reaches preliminary position that Amazon's and Microsoft's market leading cloud services should be designated under the DMA

The Commission has informed Amazon and Microsoft of its preliminary view that they should be designated as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), for their cloud computing services, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure (Azure) respectively.

In both cases, the Commission preliminarily finds that AWS and Azure, the largest and second largest cloud computing services in the EU respectively, are an important gateway between businesses and their customers in the EU.

Amazon and Microsoft have already been designated as gatekeepers for other services, demonstrating their significant impact on the internal market. They both have vast and entrenched user bases and appear to benefit from lock-in effects and high switching costs, in addition to a large ecosystem. Furthermore, their portfolio of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and partnerships have become a decisive factor in cloud procurement, and both appear to hold an entrenched and durable position in the EU cloud computing sector, as is evidenced by AWS's and Azure's leading market position over many years.

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