The European Commission just fired a shot across the bow of Big Cloud. On November 18, EU regulators opened formal market investigations into whether Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services should be designated as “gatekeepers” under the Digital Markets Act, a classification that would subject both platforms to a sweeping set of competition rules designed to pry open dominant digital markets.
Here’s the thing: neither company actually meets the DMA’s standard quantitative thresholds. The law typically requires 45 million monthly active users in the EU and a market capitalization of at least €75 billion to trigger gatekeeper status. The Commission is arguing that qualitative factors, namely the sheer dominance these two platforms wield over European cloud infrastructure, justify the designation anyway.
What the EU is actually doing
Azure and AWS together account for roughly 70% of European cloud revenue. Preliminary findings from the investigation are expected around the week of June 22, 2026. A final decision on gatekeeper status is targeted before the end of that year.
Amazon is already designated a gatekeeper for its Marketplace platform. Microsoft holds the same designation for LinkedIn. Both are among a total of seven companies currently carrying the gatekeeper label. But extending the framework to cloud infrastructure would represent a meaningful expansion of the DMA’s reach into territory it hasn’t previously touched.
