What the Commission Actually Launched in November 2025
The Digital Markets Act came into full enforcement in March 2024, with six gatekeepers initially designated: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft. That original designation covered Amazon’s core platform services — primarily its marketplace — but explicitly excluded Amazon Web Services. Similarly, Microsoft’s gatekeeper designation covered Windows, LinkedIn, Teams, and the Edge browser, but not Azure.
Cloud infrastructure was not absent from the DMA’s reach. The regulation lists “cloud computing services” as one of the core platform services subject to potential gatekeeper designation. But as of March 2024, the Commission determined that neither AWS nor Azure individually met the quantitative thresholds for presumed gatekeeper status — €75 billion annual European Economic Area turnover and 45 million monthly active end users — leaving cloud infrastructure in a gap between the DMA’s aspirations and its initial implementation.
That changed in November 2025. The Commission opened formal market investigations into both AWS and Azure, alongside a third investigation examining whether the DMA’s existing rules need to be updated to effectively address cloud market practices. The investigations do not presume guilt — they are the formal mechanism for gathering evidence that will determine whether a gatekeeper designation is warranted. The Commission’s timeline to conclude: by November 2026, 12 months from launch.
The DMA’s first formal review, completed April 30, 2026, confirmed the investigation is proceeding on schedule and that cloud services remain the principal enforcement gap under the current gatekeeper list. The next full DMA review under Article 53 is scheduled in three years — but the cloud gatekeeper determination could arrive much sooner, at the November 2026 investigation conclusion.
Why AWS and Azure Are the Investigation’s Focus
The market concentration data frames the investigation’s logic clearly. Three US hyperscalers — AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — collectively control more than 65% of the EU cloud market. This concentration is not merely a size issue: it creates structural barriers that smaller European providers and enterprise customers experience daily.
The Commission’s investigation targets four specific practices that it will assess for competitive harm:
Interoperability obstacles: Cloud platforms use proprietary APIs, data formats, and management interfaces that make switching providers technically complex and expensive. A company that has built its infrastructure on AWS-specific services faces months of re-engineering to migrate to an alternative. The DMA’s interoperability obligation — if applied to cloud — would require that AWS and Azure publish open APIs and support standardized data portability protocols.
Data access limitations: Enterprise customers and third-party developers report persistent difficulties obtaining granular performance data, billing data, and usage analytics from cloud platforms in comparable, portable formats. This informational asymmetry disadvantages customers in renegotiating contracts and prevents third-party tools from providing competitive alternatives to native cloud monitoring and analytics services.
Service bundling: AWS and Azure both offer extensive ecosystem services — compute, storage, databases, AI/ML, security, identity — that are architected to reward customers who consolidate across the ecosystem and penalize those who mix providers. The investigation will examine whether this bundling constitutes unfair self-preferencing that disadvantages competing specialist vendors.
Contractual imbalances: Enterprise cloud contracts frequently include long-term commitment discounts (Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Azure Committed Use) structured in ways that create switching costs. Volume pricing tiers also reset if a customer shifts workloads to a competing provider, creating a financial disincentive to multi-cloud architecture even when technical alternatives are available.
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What Designation Would Actually Require
If the Commission designates AWS and Azure as gatekeepers by November 2026, the obligations take effect immediately upon the designation decision. Under the DMA, designated gatekeepers for cloud services would be required to:
- Open APIs and interoperability: Publish machine-readable API specifications that allow third-party tools and competing cloud providers to interact with their services without proprietary dependencies
- Non-discriminatory data access: Provide enterprise customers with access to their own performance, usage, and billing data in portable, standardized formats
- Fairer contracting: Remove contractual terms that effectively punish multi-cloud strategies or impose switching costs through loyalty pricing structures
- Prohibition on self-preferencing: Stop using proprietary technical advantages to favor their own ecosystem services over competing specialist providers
Non-compliance would expose AWS and Azure to fines of up to 10% of global annual revenue — a figure that, applied to companies of this scale, would represent billions of euros per enforcement action.
What This Means for Enterprise Cloud Buyers and Competing Providers
1. Audit Your Cloud Contracts Before the November 2026 Decision
Enterprise procurement and legal teams should conduct a full audit of their AWS and Azure agreements ahead of the designation decision. Key items to identify: long-term commitment structures that penalize provider diversification, egress fee terms (data movement costs that create exit barriers), and API terms that restrict data portability. If designation occurs, customers will be entitled to renegotiate terms that conflict with the new gatekeeper obligations — but only if they understand which terms are at issue. Contracts signed or renewed after November 2026 may need to be assessed for DMA-compliance from the outset.
2. Build Multi-Cloud Architecture as a Strategic Option, Not Just a Backup
The DMA’s interoperability obligations, if applied to cloud, would make multi-cloud architectures less expensive to maintain — because portability would be a regulatory right rather than a re-engineering project. Engineering and architecture teams at enterprises currently locked into single-provider ecosystems should begin evaluating the abstraction layers (Kubernetes, Terraform, OpenTofu, Crossplane) that allow workloads to be redeployed across providers with reduced migration cost. The regulatory push from the DMA aligns with the technical best practice of provider independence — but only organizations that have built abstraction-ready architectures will capture the benefit when regulatory portability rights arrive.
3. Watch the Third Investigation — DMA Rule Updates Could Reach Beyond AWS and Azure
The Commission’s third investigation — examining whether the DMA’s existing rules need updating to address cloud practices — is the structurally most important of the three. Its conclusions could lead to new regulatory obligations that apply not just to designated cloud gatekeepers but to the entire cloud market, including mid-tier providers and specialist cloud services. Organizations with significant cloud dependencies should monitor the Commission’s consultation documents during the investigation period (through 2026-2027) and participate in public comment processes, since enterprise buyer testimony about contractual imbalances and switching costs will directly influence the regulatory outcome.
The Antitrust Question the DMA Cannot Fully Answer
The DMA is a regulatory tool, not a competition law remedy. Its obligations are forward-looking behavioral requirements, not retrospective penalties for past harm. This distinction matters for the cloud investigation’s expected impact.
Even if AWS and Azure are designated as gatekeepers by November 2026, and even if the DMA’s interoperability and portability requirements are fully enforced, the structural concentration that gave these platforms their market position — 65%+ EU cloud market share — will not dissolve quickly. Enterprise cloud migrations are multi-year projects measured in IT transformation budgets and risk tolerance, not regulatory timelines. European alternative providers (OVHcloud, Hetzner, Deutsche Telekom Open Telekom Cloud, Scaleway) are growing, but from a market share base that makes near-term structural rebalancing unlikely.
The DMA’s real leverage is in the next wave of enterprise decision-making: companies that are selecting cloud platforms for new workloads in 2026-2028 will make those decisions in an environment where regulatory portability rights are available, where switching cost structures are under regulatory scrutiny, and where the Commission has demonstrated a willingness to fine gatekeepers at scale. For enterprises, this regulatory environment creates the best conditions for multi-cloud adoption that have ever existed in Europe. Whether enterprises use that leverage is the open question that the market, not the regulator, will answer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Does the DMA investigation affect Google Cloud in the same way?
Google Cloud is within scope of the Commission’s broader cloud market assessment, but the November 2025 investigation explicitly targets AWS and Azure. Google Cloud’s market share in Europe is substantially smaller than AWS or Azure, and Google’s existing DMA gatekeeper designation (covering Search, Maps, Android, Chrome, and Gmail) does not currently extend to Google Cloud infrastructure. The third investigation — examining whether DMA rules need updating — could eventually reach Google Cloud as well.
Q: What happens if AWS or Azure disputes the gatekeeper designation?
The DMA provides a designation challenge process: gatekeepers can submit evidence rebutting the presumption of designation, and the Commission must consider it. However, the process does not automatically suspend the investigation timeline. Designated gatekeepers that challenge their status before EU courts (the General Court of the EU) can seek interim measures to delay obligation enforcement while the challenge proceeds — a tactic both Apple and Google have used against earlier DMA obligations.
Q: How soon could gatekeeper obligations actually take effect?
If the Commission issues a designation decision by November 2026, designated cloud gatekeepers would typically have six months to achieve compliance with core DMA obligations — meaning full enforcement could begin as early as May 2027. Complex interoperability obligations may be given longer implementation periods if technical complexity warrants it, as was the case with messaging interoperability obligations applied to other gatekeepers.
Sources & Further Reading
- EU DMA Review: What the First Digital Markets Act Review Actually Changes — Tech Policy Press
- Digital Markets Act: Microsoft Azure and AWS Gatekeeper Investigation — MSFTNewsNow
- EU Probes AWS and Azure Under DMA Gatekeeper Rules — WindowsForum
- EU DMA Review: AI and Cloud Enforcement 2026 — ComplianceHub
- Digital Markets Act — Official EC Website
