GB, Amazon and Microsoft have a dominant position in the cloud

The UK Competition Authority has found that US giants Microsoft and Amazon's dominant position in the UK cloud services sector warrants their designation as "strategic market participants"—a status that would require them to meet special requirements under a new regime that came into force earlier this year. "Competition is not working well" in the cloud sector, and "we have therefore made recommendations to address the situation," according to the findings of an investigation launched by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in 2023.

The antitrust authority has therefore recommended initiating a procedure—the same one recently authorized for Apple and Google in the mobile platform sector, namely smartphones and tablets—to assess whether the two giants should be classified as companies subject to "strategic market status" and thus subject to a series of measures to improve competition. The new UK regime in this regard is inspired by the European Digital Markets Act (DMA), which major tech giants, including Apple, Google, and Meta, must comply with in the EU with the aim of eliminating abuses of dominant positions.