The European Commission is investigating whether US cloud giants Amazon and Microsoft should be designated as gatekeepers under the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), the bloc’s tech chief Henna Virkkunen announced on Tuesday.

The probes will assess whether Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure should be subject to regulation under the DMA. The Commission wants to conclude the market checks on the two services within 12 months.

According to a Commission press statement, AWS and Azure do not meet the usual gatekeeper “thresholds” set out in the law, as regards size, user numbers, or market position. But the EU’s executive said the probe will assess whether the cloud services should nonetheless fall within the scope of the Big Tech rulebook because they act as “important gateways between businesses and consumers”.

AWS and Azure occupy “very strong market positions in relation to businesses and consumers”, the Commission added.

The EU probe follows a similar inquiry by the UK’s competition authority, which last month recommended designating AWS and Azure as holding strategic market power under the country’s own platform power rulebook.

In the bloc’s case, if the Commission’s investigation concludes that the two cloud giants do fall within the scope of the DMA, then Amazon and Microsoft would have six months to come into compliance.

In response to the EU’s investigation, a Microsoft spokesperson described the cloud sector in Europe as “innovative, highly competitive, and an accelerator for growth across the economy”, adding: “We stand ready to contribute to the European Commission’s market enquiry.”

A spokesperson for AWS warned against designating cloud providers, suggesting action against the sector “isn’t worth the risks of stifling innovation or raising costs for European companies”.

Microsoft and Amazon are already designated as DMA gatekeepers but the investigation announced today will determine whether their respective cloud computing services should be designated as so-called “core platform services”.

AWS is typically reported as taking around a third of the infrastructure-as-a-service market globally, while Azure takes closer to a quarter.

Cloud computing market probe

Separately, the Commission announced a third investigation, that it said will look more broadly at how cloud computing services should be tackled under the DMA.

The cloud computing market investigation will gather information from other players to check for any competition issues – in areas like service access, interoperability, and bundling – that might be limiting growth in the sector, it said.

Asked at the daily press conference why the Commission is not also investigating Google’s cloud business, digital spokesperson Thomas Regnier said that preliminary evidence showed the company plays a less important role in the market than Microsoft and Amazon. “Let me not prejudge the outcome of this market investigation,” he added.

(nl, aw)

UPDATE: Updated at 13:32 on November 18 with information from the Commission’s press briefing