the UK Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024<\/a>, both Microsoft and AWS could be designated as Strategic Market Suppliers (SMS):<\/p>\nThis would enable the CMA to impose targeted and bespoke interventions to address the concerns we have identified, including with respect to features where there are specification risks around the design of effective market interventions. The CMA\u2019s powers under the DMCC Act have been specifically designed to be effective in digital markets and, if the CMA was to designate Microsoft and AWS with SMS, it would be able to address the concerns we have identified with conduct requirements or other interventions. Measures aimed at Microsoft and AWS would address market-wide concerns by directly benefitting most UK customers and producing wider indirect effects by altering the competitive conditions for other providers.<\/p>\n
OK, sounds good, let\u2019s do it ASAP! Er, not so fast there. Remember, in UK political circles, it takes a long time to do things quickly – and this is going to be no exception. What happens now is the question of whether to open a further probe into whether the two firms should be declared SMS will be considered. How long that takes remains to be seen, but whatever happens, it\u2019s not going to be until some time next year as there are other investigations still ongoing.<\/p>\n
A cynic might at this point ponder whether the idea of not rocking the boat too much with two US suppliers that have the UK cloud economy in a neck lock might be a case of better to threaten a big stick than actually to use it in earnest. Either way, it looks as though any future restrictions on Microsoft and AWS activities and practices will be something for 2027. Or 2028. Or even, if we can get away with it, a problem for the next Government?<\/p>\n
Through the looking glass<\/p>\n
Not that this effective stay of execution made any difference to the public tantrums being thrown by the two US vendors at being ticked off by the Brits. Microsoft sniffed:<\/p>\n
The CMA panel\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile AWS officially warned that action would risk making the UK \u201ca global outlier at a time when businesses need regulatory predictability\u201d and said:<\/p>\n
The inquiry group\u2019s final report disregards clear evidence of robust competition in the UK\u2019s IT services industry, which cloud computing has revolutionised by dramatically reducing costs and expanding customer choice and flexibility.<\/p>\n
Now, you may note the word \u2018officially\u2019 doing a bit of heavy lifting there. That\u2019s because there was a lot more to come from AWS. Literally minutes after the CMA recommendations were published came an unsolicited email from the company offering \u201csome additional perspective on attributable background\u201d. What that meant, it said, was, \u201cYou can\u2019t quote the information directly; however, you can use\u2026and attribute to AWS\u201d.<\/p>\n
Hang on, I replied, if I can say the information\u2019s come from AWS, why can\u2019t I put your brand name to it? This resulted in the said \u201cadditional perspective\u201d being sent to me – NB: I didn\u2019t at any point request it – with further \u2018clarification\u2019 that, “you can say in your piece –\u00a0According to AWS\u2026(AWS bolding)\u00a0– but you can\u2019t directly quote AWS from the background points\u201d.<\/p>\n
Now that we were well and truly through Alice\u2019s Looking Glass, I had a quick scan of the \u201cadditional perspective\u201d which basically consisted of a bit of Microsoft bashing, some self-congratulatory PR puff about AWS pricing and investments, and sniping that requiring cloud services to be fully interoperable would actually be a bad thing and stifle innovation without benefiting customers. No evidence was presented to support that last one, just more assertions.<\/p>\n
All of that is what AWS want you to know, but they don\u2019t want me to write down and put \u2018AWS says\u2026\u2019 in front of it. Why not? Surely everything that\u2019s been sent out to lots and lots of journalists is true and demonstrably accurate? And given this lengthy email came, unsolicited, within minutes of the CMA report, it must have been prepared quite some time in advance and signed off on by the various vested interests and stakeholders before before being mass-mailed to heaven knows how many media and analysts, so it must represent the company\u2019s position.<\/p>\n
So, again, why doesn\u2019t AWS want to have its name cited next to direct quotes from their own content, content that it was so keen for me to see that it didn\u2019t even wait for me to ask for it to be sent over, let alone agree to any ludicrous caveats about how I might use the “additional perspective”.<\/p>\n
At such times, there\u2019s nothing to beat a closed question that needs only an initial \u2018yes\u2019 or \u2018no\u2019 response. So, in the interests of fairness, I asked AWS at 1.44 pm yesterday the following:<\/p>\n
Is the information being offered over as background something AWS would stand by in court? Or to a [UK Government] Select Committee? If it is, why can\u2019t you put your company\u2019s name to it?\u00a0<\/p>\n
As of midday today – when this is being written – I can\u2019t provide you with a \u2018yes\u2019 or \u2018no\u2019 as AWS has apparently ignored the email. Deafening silence for the best part of 24 hours. That seems very strange given all that AWS has been asked to do is to confirm that it is entirely comfortable with the accuracy and validity of comments that it is offering up to the media to broadcast\u2026just not with \u2018AWS says\u2026\u2019 anywhere near it. Surely it must be? Otherwise, what’s the point of sending them into the public domain? It can’t be to undermine the CMA conclusions while trying not to get dirty fingers in the process. So, why? If AWS decides to answer my straight question, I’ll update this article.\u00a0<\/p>\n
My take<\/p>\n
Look, I\u2019m all for having a go at emulating the White Queen from Through The Looking Glass and trying to believe \u201csix impossible things before breakfast\u201d, but the engagement with AWS yesterday was one of the most bizarre encounters I\u2019ve had in 35 years in this game.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve all had off-the-record briefings before, of course, but this background spoon-feeding of claims and assertions, that in their own right are pretty harmless and certainly don\u2019t merit this level of paranoia around them,\u00a0smacks of control freakery of the highest order. In fact, it\u2019s the sort of behavior you might expect from the big kid in the playground who\u2019s not been told \u2018no\u2019 for a long, long time and who now finds his or her dominance being challenged – all of which rather seems to validate further the CMA conclusions\u2026and that certainly wasn\u2019t the plan I\u2019m sure.<\/p>\n
By contrast, Microsoft has displayed an almost dignified restraint so far. As well it might as nothing much has changed on the back of the CMA findings and nothing is likely to change any time soon. As a country, the UK has now told AWS and Microsoft that they\u2019re on the naughty step and that it\u2019s now going to have to have a jolly good long think about what to do next and then decide after that what ought to be done next – at some point, in the future, when the time is right etc etc.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, Microsoft this week announced that its Azure cloud offering is running at a 34% per annum growth rate, topping $75 billion in fiscal 2025. Still, small potatoes compared to AWS annual run rate of north of $111 billion.\u00a0There\u2019s always a silver lining, eh?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) market dominance is stifling the UK cloud sector! Yeah, yeah, yeah –…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38772,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[4688,84,22488,8809,80,467,306,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-38771","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-markets","8":"tag-audio","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-cloud-platforms-infrastructure-and-architecture","11":"tag-ethics","12":"tag-government","13":"tag-markets","14":"tag-regulation","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38771\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}