Cloudy Logic: The DMA’s Search for a Gatekeeper
The Digital Markets Act (DMA) was supposed to target gatekeepers. Instead, it is chasing a market that has no gate.
Last November, the European Commission opened three market investigations into whether Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure qualify as gatekeepers under the DMA—even as it acknowledged that no cloud service provider meets the act’s own quantitative thresholds. That admission deserves more attention than it has received. It is not a procedural footnote. It is a quiet confession that the framework does not fit.
The DMA was always a blunt instrument—an agglomeration of highly heterogeneous companies and products shoehorned into a single, static regulatory regime, united by little more than size, American origin, and political unpopularity in Brussels. No category in the law’s sprawling list of core platform services (CPS) better exposes that incoherence than cloud computing.
Cloud is not a platform. It is not a gateway. It does not connect millions of consumers to businesses. It is B2B infrastructure. Yet the Commission now presses ahead with bespoke investigations to sidestep the logic—and the thresholds—its own regulation imposes. Understanding why, and what it reveals, goes to the core of what is wrong with the DMA.