A preliminary designation under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) would force AWS and Azure to open interoperability, data portability, and self preferencing doors for European enterprise customers, but the harder question is whether a competition framework written for app stores…
The European Commission is preparing to call Amazon and Microsoft cloud services digital "gatekeepers" under the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), the competition law that until now has spent its energy on app stores, search engines, and mobile operating systems. The preliminary designation, announced on 25 June 2026, would cover Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, the two largest providers of infrastructure-as-a-service in the European Union. It would not cover Google Cloud.
That distinction matters. Gatekeeper status under the DMA is not a label of shame. It is a regulatory status that forces specific obligations on platforms the Commission considers dominant: interoperability mandates, data portability requirements, anti-self-preferencing rules, and so-called FRAND access to core platform services. The Commission's preliminary position argues that AWS and Azure meet the quantitative thresholds and the entrenched, durable position the DMA uses to define gatekeepers.
But this is not the same fight the DMA has fought before. The law was written for two-sided consumer platforms where lock-in happens in defaults, payment rails, and store rules. Cloud lock-in lives somewhere stranger: in infrastructure APIs, egress fees, certification regimes, identity layers such as Microsoft Entra ID, and the multi-year professional services contracts that come with migration off a hyperscaler. The remedies that worked against Apple's App Store or Google's search box do not obviously map to a market where the dominant players have already shaped the technical terrain, according to trade press reporting on the Commission's preliminary findings.
The Commission is being careful about the legal limits. Cloud services were carved into DMA enforcement scope only in November 2025, when Brussels opened a formal market investigation under Article 17 of the regulation. The June preliminary findings are not a final designation; AWS and Microsoft retain the right to be heard before any formal decision. Even so, Politico reported that the Commission's framing positions cloud alongside app stores and search as a "core platform service" under the DMA, a doctrinal expansion the firms are likely to contest.
European policymakers have been signaling concern about hyperscaler lock-in for years. France's Nextcloud rollout and broader digital sovereignty push are the most visible expression of that anxiety, as catalogued in European Sting's coverage of the EU cloud debate. Gatekeeper status would give the Commission a formal lever to require interoperability and data portability across cloud providers, something enterprise customers have asked for and hyperscalers have resisted on commercial and security grounds.
The harder question, and the one that will define whether this matters, is mechanism. Can interoperability mandates written for operating systems be sensibly applied to infrastructure APIs whose value comes from being consistent, predictable, and difficult to leave? Can data portability rules designed around app data and contact lists be applied to petabyte-scale enterprise workloads where the data is rarely the lock-in anyway? Can anti-self-preferencing rules that worked against app store self-dealing be enforced against a hyperscaler that bundles compute, storage, AI services, and proprietary certification paths into a single commercial offer?
The Commission's own track record on DMA enforcement suggests it will spend the next year finding out. The standard gatekeeper timeline runs from preliminary findings, to right to be heard, to formal designation, to compliance obligations, and finally to fines of up to 10% of global turnover for non-compliance. Designation is, in that sense, the start of the conversation, not its conclusion.
What to watch next is whether the Commission uses the cloud designation to invent new remedies specific to infrastructure markets, or to apply existing DMA tools to a market they were not designed for. The answer will tell European enterprise customers how much their real switching costs actually fall, and it will tell the rest of the world whether Brussels' competition model can travel from storefronts to servers.