Watchdog fails to stop big vendor lock-in, say UK cloud market's smaller players

Britain's competition regulator is facing biting criticism from local cloud providers for declining to act on Committed Spend Agreements (CSAs), the sales tools that AWS and Microsoft use to lure customers. The Competition and Markets Authority's decision to shelve the CSA component of its investigation into the health of the …

[Vikingforties]

If true about the CMA being in receipt of AWS largess, should they not have recused themselves from the process?

I think the average person on the Clapham Omnibus can see there's a racket going on here.

[Anonymous Coward]

The CMAS and AWS largesse

It is true that a) the CMA uses AWS services; b) these services are bought with preferential pricing under the OGVA2 committed spend discount - and the CMA has just provisionally decided that committed spend discounts/agreements are not anti-competitive; and c) the CMA is now chaired by Doug Gurr on an interim basis. Gurr had a long and distinguished career at Amazon. Gurr is not shown as a board member on the CMA's website, therefore his financial interests are undeclared (unlike every other CMA board member or advisor, including interims).

[Vikingforties]

Re: The CMAS and AWS largesse

That's a Private Eye story right there, that is.

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I'd rather not buy American

'nuff said ?

[ecofeco]

Watchdog?

Ah, but for whom?

Got to ask the right questions in this modern world of dollar store game of thrones.

[MatthewSt]

Civo?

Does someone want to let Civo know they're UK based? There's a very well hidden page talking about sovereign UK cloud, but all their prices are in dollars.

[John Smith 19]

What a shocker HMG *loves* the big suppliers

Again.

[Nematode]

Regulator schmegulator.

The world has moved to a new feudalism with BigCo owning everything, including governments: Little man, kneel before my magnificence!

Yours, @vassal_647

[PeterOR]

Silent Taxation

Once our core publicly funded services are inside any of these deals, exiting the arrangements are deliberately complex and expensive. Over time, the Mountain View lot will have strategies for increasing revenue £1 at a time based on a per licenced seat charging model. Kerching!

Worse, in the longterm our own broader economy suffers. Excluding smaller vendors by price them out of the market means those vendors are not 'economically available' to other end users that the Mountain View folks themselves are not directly interested in.

This stifles economic growth in our broader economy because this large section of the market cannot, on an individual basis, get to the pricing levels CSA is offering to the big spenders. Nor can the vendors afford to support their customers without directly charging them for their services because of the lack of margin in the core underlying services. This slows down adoption / innovation.