The European Commission is putting the final touches on a decision that would designate Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as “gatekeepers” under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, Bloomberg reported October 2, 2026, citing people familiar with the matter. A formal designation could arrive as soon as November, marking the first time the bloc’s core platform-competition law has been extended to cloud computing, though the draft decision’s timing could still slip.
Why Regulators Are Targeting Cloud Despite the Thresholds
AWS and Azure do not meet the DMA’s standard quantitative tests for size and user numbers, but the Commission concluded in a June 25, 2026 preliminary finding that both still function as critical gateways between businesses and customers. Regulators cited large, long-standing enterprise customer bases that face high switching costs, deep ecosystem bundling, and growing AI compute capacity concentrated inside the providers’ own platforms. Google Cloud was not included in the draft designation, according to the reporting.
Compliance Deadline and Enterprise Risk
If finalized, Amazon and Microsoft would have six months to comply with DMA gatekeeper obligations, including interoperability with competing services, data-portability guarantees, and restrictions on self-preferencing and tying. Noncompliance carries fines of up to 10% of worldwide annual revenue, rising to 20% for repeat violations, a material enterprise-risk and compliance-planning factor for security and IT teams managing multicloud and data-portability strategy with either provider.
The designation remains in draft form and the Commission has not publicly confirmed a decision date, so enterprise customers should treat the November timeline as provisional pending formal notice. More cloud and regulatory developments are tracked in the SectechMedia Technology News archive.