Tech Giants' Cloud Power Probed As EU Weighs Inclusion In DMA (bloomberg.com) 13
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft's Azure, and Alphabet's Google Cloud risk being dragged into the scope of the European Union's crackdown on Big Tech as antitrust watchdogs prepare to study the platforms' market power. The European Commission wants to decide if any of the trio should face a raft of new restrictions under the bloc's Digital Markets Act (source paywalled; alternative source), according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity. The plan for a market probe follows several major outages in the cloud industry that wrought havoc across global services, highlighting the risks of relying on a mere handful of players.
To date, the world's largest cloud providers have avoided the DMA because a large part of their business comes via enterprise contracts, making it difficult to count the number of individual users, one of the EU's main benchmarks for earmarking Silicon Valley services for extra oversight. Under the investigation's remit, regulators will asses whether the top cloud operators -- regardless of the challenge of counting user numbers -- should be forced to contend with a raft of fresh obligations including increased interoperability with rival software and better data portability for users, as well as restrictions on tying and bundling.
To date, the world's largest cloud providers have avoided the DMA because a large part of their business comes via enterprise contracts, making it difficult to count the number of individual users, one of the EU's main benchmarks for earmarking Silicon Valley services for extra oversight. Under the investigation's remit, regulators will asses whether the top cloud operators -- regardless of the challenge of counting user numbers -- should be forced to contend with a raft of fresh obligations including increased interoperability with rival software and better data portability for users, as well as restrictions on tying and bundling.
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Hmm, let's see... Airbus is outcompeting Boeing. Siemens seems to be doing fine. SAP is huge...
Maybe Europe's strength is in actual engineering more than cloud stuff? (Though, they have their own cloud companies like OVH that are fantastic... I use OVH myself.)
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It's almost like you don't know what market power is. Hint: Europe brings them up all the time, and Americans keep buying them out. Is there something in the Literally last week the most recent European cloud company was bought out by an American firm https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dutchnews.nl%2F2025%2F... [dutchnews.nl] Is there something in American culture that prevents them from innovating instead relying on buying European companies?
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why even bother? he seems happy with his myth.
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Maybe because the US has the means to buy them and not the other way around? They can't even pay for their own national defense.
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"Can't afford" and "CBF" are two different things. You spend your money on the MIC, we'll spend it on our people. There's a reason why we're rated the top in happiness among the west and the USA further down the bottom.
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Maybe Europe should ban selling companies to Americans, eh?
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There is a discussion about that underway. No doubt the OP will turn around and spin that into yet another EU being anti-American tech company rant.
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Europe obviously has rival cloud providers. The criteria are very simple, and apply to EU and foreign companies alike; it's 50 million monthly users. The only reason these particular ones were not considered before, as mentioned in the summary, is that these particular companies make it difficult to count their users.
Are cloud services gatekeepers ? (Score:1)
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