EU Wants to Subject American Cloud Giants to DMA

After recent outages with global impact, the European Commission is considering reviewing the status of cloud giants AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud under the DMA law.

Cloud providers AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud may soon be subject to stricter rules under the DMA legislation. The European Commission is calling for an investigation into the market influence of the three largest cloud players. Although the parent organizations have been in the strictest category for some time, the cloud divisions have so far been spared.

The DMA (Digital Markets Act) primarily looks at the number of users to determine the level of rules that a digital service provider must comply with. This is less obvious with cloud providers because they work with enterprise contracts. The European Commission will investigate whether a re-evaluation of their status is necessary, Bloomberg writes.

The outcome of the investigation may determine whether the three major cloud providers will have new obligations imposed regarding interoperability with competing software and better data portability for users, as well as restrictions on tying and bundling. Microsoft, among others, has been reprimanded for this in the past by the European Union, although it managed to buy off a complaint from industry association CISPE with a million-dollar check.

Outages

Whether the investigation is a result of recent outages at the providers is left open. In any case, the AWS outage last month made it clear that an outage in one data center can have global consequences. A DNS error in an American data center also had consequences for users in Europe. Asana and Signal, among others, were unreachable for a while.

Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud shared in the blows. An Azure outage affected the airline from Alaska to the Scottish Parliament, while a Google outage affected Spotify and Discord. Although more the exception than the rule, a hyperscaler’s data center only has to be down for a short time to take web services out of service for users worldwide, often resulting in major financial damage.

The US government will absolutely not appreciate it if the EU tightens the rules. Trump and his administration consider every form of European regulation as a burden and a targeting of American companies. While Washington ramps up the pressure, the European Union is caught between upholding its principles or giving in.