“The report that the CMA produced was a really comprehensive one, completely understanding the nature of the industry. We’ve been at the sharp end of uncompetitive behavior for some time,” she added.
And concerns have also been expressed in the US. “Kip Meek’s resignation highlights a stark reality: Diagnosing a potentially flawed, highly concentrated cloud market is useless if the watchdog lacks the urgency to address it. Right now, the hyperscalers are operating business-as-usual while the CMA hits the snooze button,” said Dave McCarthy, research vice president at IDC.
Regulators across the globe are currently investigating the cloud market. Last month, the US Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation into Microsoft’s position and whether it had an unfair advantage against other cloud competitors. And in November last year, the European Commission opened three market investigations on cloud computing services under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), including an investigation as to whether the DMA can effectively tackle practices that may limit competitiveness and fairness in the cloud computing sector in the EU.”
Stewart highlighted the EC’s action. “The commission kicked off three inquiries last autumn and they’re due to make an interim report in May or June. They may well get there before the CMA, which started three years earlier,” she said.
The situation needs to be resolved quickly given the increasing importance of AI in today’s market and the need for competitive cloud services to support it, said Terrar: “AI, particularly agentic AI, is going to change the cloud market. We’re going to see some changes, for example, more processing at the edge, and the cloud infrastructure is so fundamental to the industry today.”
And, of course, there’s the additional cost, said Stewart: “There was a footnote in the CMA report that the UK is paying about £500m too more for cloud, because of the dominance of the big players: there’s a need for more competition.”
