Brit watchdog pushes to rein in Microsoft and AWS with 'strategic market status' Britain's competition regulator says Microsoft and AWS are using their dominance to harm UK cloud customers and proposes to designate both with strategic market status (SMS) to take action against them. Nothing ever happens quickly in the world of watchdogs and following a 21-month investigation into the health of the local …
Given that the vast majority of the UK’s AWS’s systems are hosted in the *AWS-Europe- west-1 region in Dublin … I’m wondering how far the CMA’s reach stretches.
Esp.. With the UK being outside of the EU post the catastrophe of Brexit… where with sweet irony those rules should have been enforceable throughout the EU….
* simple because the UK region not stood up until 2016… and most already had a foothold in Ireland.
The CMA - valiantly wrapping a two-year yawn into a PDF to prove it noticed what everyone else already knew. Microsoft and AWS are gouging UK businesses? Groundbreaking. And the grand solution? Wait until 2026 to consider doing something - maybe. Meanwhile, these same corporations are raking in billions from government contracts to run the very infrastructure the public depends on.
It’s pure theatre. A bit of “strategic market status” lipstick on the monopolist pig, while ministers keep signing off on secret cloud deals like it’s a loyalty scheme. The CMA pretends to regulate, the government pretends to care, and taxpayers foot the bill twice - once in inflated cloud costs, and again in outsourced sovereignty.
"It risks making the UK a global outlier at a time when businesses need regulatory predictability for the UK to maintain international competitiveness. We will continue to engage constructively with the CMA as they consider their next steps."
If you can't come up with a legitimate grievance, don't make up something that is meaningless bollocks-bingo word salad at best, but more likely is just plain wrong.
what teeth the watchdog has?
MS and Amazon could probably buy the whole UK and there is little we could do to stop them. Ok, they might need a whole Zuck and a lot of Musk but the bunch of numbskulls we have in power are clueless and Farage is just another Trump cult member who will do whatever 'Daddy' tells him to do.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/13/contents
They have many powers. Ultimately if a company ignores their interventions a court can issue an order against individual managers and if those managers still don't comply a contempt of court prosecution could follow against them as individuals. There're also a few more direct criminal offences related to obstructing CMA investigations.
(As far as I've followed they've been deliberately toothed-up to avoid the scenario where mega-corps simply outspend them challenging judgements in court over and over. Remains to be seen how effective it will be and what downsides there are. Presumably they'll still be chronically underfunded to limit the risk of overzealous damage).
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