U.K. Watchdog Doubles Down on AWS, Microsoft Competition Concerns Under New Tech Law
Dow Jones Newswires ·
By Edith Hancock
The U.K. competition watchdog said certain features in the country's cloud-services market hurt competition and that it would investigate whether tech giants Amazon Web Services and Microsoft comply with its new technology law.
"Microsoft and AWS have been generating sustained returns from their cloud services substantially above their cost of capital in cloud services for a number of years," the Competition and Markets Authority said on Thursday. The regulator started looking into the cloud software services space in 2023.
As part of that investigation, a panel of experts provisionally told the CMA in January it should investigate the companies to check if they need to comply with the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Act. That rulebook obliges businesses the CMA sees as having outsized power in the digital economy--or so-called strategic market status--to avoid favoring their own products and services over rivals.
"The CMA Panel's most recent publication misses the mark again, ignoring that the cloud market has never been so dynamic and competitive, with record investment, and rapid, AI-driven changes," a Microsoft spokesperson said.
AWS also criticized the verdict. "The action proposed by the Inquiry Group is unwarranted and undermines the substantial investment and innovation that have already benefited hundreds of thousands of UK businesses," a company spokesperson said.
Write to Edith Hancock at [email protected]
Source:
Dow Jones Newswires