Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has concluded that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure should not be designated as having dominant status in the cloud market under the U.K.’s digital markets regime.
In its decision, which followed a three-year investigation, the CMA concluded that neither of the two leading American cloud services have Strategic Market Status (SMS), a designation that under the U.K.’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCC) would have imposed a range of new obligations on how they operate in the U.K. and allowed the CMA to impose conduct requirements or even pro-competition interventions.
Both Microsoft and Amazon have made a range of commitments to the CMA that address the fees customers pay to change and the ease of interoperability between different providers, said the CMA in its announcement.
The CMA will continue to engage with the two firms and monitor the changes, it said.
The regulator simultaneously announced that it will open a new SMS designation investigation into Microsoft’s corporate software services.
In a blog post, Microsoft President Brad Smith said that the changes proposed by the software giant address the concerns that the CMA raised during its investigation.
“We appreciate the opportunity we have had for direct and constructive conversations with the CMA and its staff and look forward to an ongoing dialogue in relation to relevant cloud issues in the future,” said Smith.
A spokesperson for AWS said that the agency’s decision “accurately reflected the industry’s dynamism,” noting that they had previously been disappointed by the agency’s 2025 recommendation to designate AWS.
In January, the chair of the panel that was in charge of the investigation into AWS and Microsoft Azure stepped down, citing the slow pace of implementing the investigation’s recommendations, as reported by The Morning Intelligence.
The European Commission is also considering whether or not to designate AWS and Microsoft Azure under the EU’s own digital market power regime.
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