The European Commission announced a preliminary decision on June 25 that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure should be designated as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act.
This is the most significant expansion of DMA enforcement since the law took effect, and it signals that Brussels is done pretending cloud infrastructure is somehow different from the platform monopolies the law was designed to rein in.
What Gatekeeper Status Actually Means
Being labeled a gatekeeper under the DMA is not a symbolic gesture. It comes with a concrete set of obligations that would fundamentally change how AWS and Azure operate in Europe. The big ones: limits on self-preferencing, requirements for interoperability, and mandates for data portability. In plain English, Amazon cannot steer customers toward its own services over competitors, and Microsoft cannot make it artificially painful to move your data off Azure.
The enforcement teeth are real. Non-compliance can trigger fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover. For Amazon and Microsoft, that translates to billions of dollars. In extreme cases, the Commission can impose structural remedies, a polite way of saying it could force the companies to divest or restructure their European operations.
The final designation is expected by October 2026, with companies getting six months to comply. That puts the practical deadline around spring 2027. Not a lot of runway for two companies whose entire business models are built on the kind of integration and lock-in that the DMA is designed to dismantle.
Why This Designation Is Unusual
Here is what makes this particularly interesting: AWS and Azure do not actually meet the DMA’s standard quantitative thresholds for user numbers and market size that normally trigger gatekeeper status. The Commission is making a qualitative judgment call, arguing that as The Register reported, the two companies’ revenue and capabilities “considerably surpassed those of their rivals.”
That is a significant precedent. The DMA was written with quantitative bright lines specifically to avoid subjective enforcement. By going below those thresholds, the Commission is signaling that dominance can be measured by competitive impact, not just raw user counts. It is a more flexible, and potentially more aggressive, reading of the law than anyone expected.
AWS holds the largest share of the EU cloud market, with Azure in second place. Combined, they control roughly 60% of the market. Google Cloud, the third-largest player, was notably not included in this preliminary designation. That omission tells you something about where the Commission draws the line: two-thirds of the market is a duopoly problem; one-fifth is just competition.
The Self-Preferencing Problem
The self-preferencing restrictions deserve particular attention because they cut to the heart of how hyperscalers make money. AWS does not just sell compute and storage. It sells an ecosystem: databases, machine learning tools, security services, analytics platforms, all tightly integrated with its core infrastructure. The pitch to enterprise customers is simple: stay inside the AWS universe and everything works together smoothly. Leave, and you are on your own.
That integration is genuinely valuable to customers. It is also genuinely anticompetitive. When AWS makes its own database product work better on AWS than a competitor’s database product does, that is not just good engineering. It is leveraging infrastructure dominance to win in adjacent markets. The DMA is designed to separate those two things.
Microsoft’s situation is arguably more complex. Azure is deeply intertwined with Microsoft 365, Dynamics, and the entire enterprise software stack that hundreds of millions of workers use daily. Requiring interoperability in that context means untangling decades of deliberate integration. As PYMNTS noted, the regulatory pressure on both companies’ cloud businesses is escalating at a time when cloud revenue growth is already the key metric Wall Street watches.
Data Portability: The Real Battleground
The data portability requirements could be the most disruptive part of the designation. Right now, moving a large enterprise workload from AWS to Azure, or from either to a European competitor, is technically possible but practically nightmarish. The data formats are different, the APIs are different, the networking configurations are different, and the migration costs can run into millions of dollars.
The DMA’s portability requirements would force AWS and Azure to make that process substantially easier. That does not mean flipping a switch; cloud infrastructure is genuinely complex. But it does mean building standardized export tools, supporting common data formats, and not charging punitive egress fees that make leaving economically irrational.
This matters beyond the immediate competitive dynamics. European policymakers have long worried about the continent’s dependence on American cloud infrastructure for everything from healthcare records to government services. Making it easier to move data between providers is, in part, an industrial policy play: lower the switching costs, and European cloud providers like OVHcloud and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Systems have a fighting chance.
How This Fits the Bigger DMA Picture
The cloud designation comes as the Commission is ramping up DMA enforcement across the board. Apple, Google, and Meta have already been designated as gatekeepers for their consumer-facing platforms. The Big Tech earnings season consistently shows how central cloud revenue is to these companies’ growth stories, which makes the regulatory scrutiny all the more consequential.
Adding cloud infrastructure to the list extends the DMA’s reach into the business-to-business market in a way that the original legislation’s drafters clearly intended but that many observers thought would take longer to materialize. The Commission is moving faster than expected, and the qualitative threshold argument gives it a tool to bring in other infrastructure players down the road.
What Comes Next
Both Amazon and Microsoft will have the opportunity to respond to the preliminary designation before the October final decision. Expect aggressive lobbying, detailed technical arguments about why cloud infrastructure is different from app stores and social networks, and probably a few threats about reduced European investment.
Those arguments will not work, at least not entirely. The Commission has signaled its direction clearly, and walking back a preliminary designation would be an enormous loss of institutional credibility. The more likely outcome is a negotiation over the specifics of compliance: what counts as “interoperable,” how portability is measured, and what timeline is realistic for implementation.
For enterprise customers, the spring 2027 compliance deadline is worth watching closely. If the DMA forces real interoperability and portability in cloud infrastructure, it could reshape how companies architect their technology stacks, not just in Europe but globally. Standards built for European compliance tend to become global defaults, because running separate technical architectures for different regulatory jurisdictions is more expensive than building to the strictest standard.
The cloud market has been a comfortable duopoly for years. Brussels just served notice that comfort is no longer guaranteed.