Amazon, Microsoft dodge UK cloud market dominance designations

(Jacob Parry – Politico) Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has concluded that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure should not be designated as having dominant status in the cloud market under the U.K.’s digital markets regime. In its decision, which followed a three-year investigation, the CMA concluded that neither of the two leading American cloud services have Strategic Market Status (SMS), a designation that under the U.K.’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCC) would have imposed a range of new obligations on how they operate in the U.K. and allowed the CMA to impose conduct requirements or even pro-competition interventions. Both Microsoft and Amazon have made a range of commitments to the CMA that address the fees customers pay to change and the ease of interoperability between different providers, said the CMA in its announcement. – Amazon, Microsoft dodge UK cloud market dominance designations – POLITICO