EU set to name AWS and Azure DMA gatekeepers in November

The European Commission plans to designate Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act in November, according to a Bloomberg report covered by The Next Web on October 2. The decision is still a draft and the timing can slip. The reason behind it is not: the Commission says these two clouds hold customers through lock-in and switching costs. That is a regulator writing down what every operator who has tried to leave a cloud already knows.

What actually happened

The Commission set out its preliminary view on June 25 (Commission press release, The Register). Key points:

• AWS and Azure are "the largest and second largest cloud computing services in the EU."
• Neither meets the DMA's usual size and user-count thresholds. The Commission is using the law's qualitative test instead, a first for the DMA.
• Its stated reasons: lock-in effects, high switching costs, a large ecosystem, and, per the Bloomberg report, keeping new AI compute demand inside their own platforms.
• Once designated, each company gets six months to comply. DMA breaches carry fines of up to 10% of worldwide turnover.

Both companies pushed back in June. AWS said the findings ignore the range of cloud options in Europe and could deter investment. Microsoft said the case ignores the growing power of Google Cloud and Gemini.

Why it matters for your business

This is not a discount on your AWS bill. Even on the fastest timeline, obligations land around mid-2027, apply in the EU, and will be argued over for years. Do not plan a migration around a regulation that has not been finalized.

It is a signal about where exit costs go. The DMA's toolkit targets self-preferencing, interoperability and data portability. If those rules bite, moving data and workloads out of the two biggest clouds gets cheaper and better documented. Vendors tend to apply one policy worldwide rather than run two.

Cheaper exits only help if your stack can move. A regulator can force a provider to hand over your data. It cannot rewrite the Lambda functions, the proprietary queue, or the managed AI service you wired into everything. The lock-in that hurts small teams is in the code, not the contract.

Do the cheap prep now. Keep data in open formats. Put infrastructure in Terraform or OpenTofu, not console clicks. Prefer Postgres, containers and S3-compatible storage over one-cloud services where the cost is close. Write down what a move would take for your top three workloads, and put a number on it.

Sources: The Next Web (citing Bloomberg), European Commission, The Register.