ICLE’s Auer: Commission’s Bid to Label AWS and Azure as Gatekeepers Misreads Cloud Competition
BRUSSELS (25 June 2026) — The European Commission’s preliminary finding that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure should be designated ‘gatekeepers’ under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) substitutes political priorities for economic evidence and stretches the act into a market it was never built to reach, said Dirk Auer, director of competition policy at the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE).
The finding follows a seven-month market investigation. By the Commission’s own admission, no cloud provider meets the DMA’s quantitative thresholds. Cloud has no ‘end users’ in the sense the act contemplates. The Commission has instead relied on a qualitative assessment to bring the firms within scope. A public consultation will precede a final decision expected later this year.
‘Setting aside the DMA’s thresholds is allowed, but it should be done with real caution and humility, because the whole case then turns on the evidence’, Auer said. ‘Here, the evidence cuts the other way. Cloud is fast-moving and fiercely competitive, yet the Commission has proceeded as if the conclusion were never in doubt’.
On every standard metric, ICLE has argued, the European cloud market looks like rivalry, not entrenchment. AWS holds roughly 28% of the market, Azure about 21% and Google Cloud around 14%—all below the 40% share that EU courts treat as a marker of likely dominance. Those shares are shifting, not ossifying, in a market the DMA is meant to reach only when it is ‘tipping’ toward a single winner.
As ICLE’s comments to the UK Competition and Markets Authority detail, concentration is a poor proxy for harm. About 70% of customers already use more than one provider, and the practices that draw the most concern—egress fees and interoperability—are already addressed by the Data Act, which mandates switching and phases out egress fees by January 2027.
The Commission’s reliance on artificial intelligence fares no better. The fear that hyperscalers’ control of computing power and models will foreclose AI start-ups runs against the evidence. Competitive entrants continue to secure the inputs they need—including funding, chips, cloud capacity, data and models. Entry has been robust. And the cloud-and-AI partnerships the Commission views warily appear, on the evidence, to be largely procompetitive.
The deeper problem, Auer said, is the assumption that forcing cloud and AI into the DMA’s one-size-fits-all template can only improve matters.
‘The DMA was built for consumer platforms that sit between millions of users and the businesses trying to reach them’, Auer said. ‘Cloud is business-to-business infrastructure. It has no gate and, in any ordinary sense, no end users. Layering that template onto a competitive market—on top of Article 102 and the Data Act, which already govern the same conduct—does not give Europe more competition. It gives Europe three overlapping regimes, more legal uncertainty and a compliance burden that falls hardest on the smaller European providers the act claims to champion. The premise that intervention here can only help and never harm is the hubris that trips up industrial policy’.
Those costs are not hypothetical. Europeans have already seen DMA mandates keep products available elsewhere out of the EU, including Apple’s new Siri AI, over the same interoperability demands now headed for cloud. A peer regulator has shown the alternative: After investigating the same market, the UK CMA declined to designate AWS, instead securing targeted commitments on egress fees and interoperability through engagement.
‘If the Commission is serious about the Draghi agenda on competitiveness, it should use the consultation to ask the question its investigation skipped’, Auer said. ‘Not how to bring cloud within the DMA, but whether cloud belongs there at all. On the evidence, it does not’.
To arrange an interview with Auer, contact Jim Fellinger at [email protected].
About ICLE
The International Center for Law & Economics is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research center working with a roster of more than one-hundred academic affiliates and research centers from around the globe. ICLE scholars promote the use of law and economics methodologies to inform public policy debates.