The EU Is About to Call AWS and Azure Gatekeepers, and Cloud Lock-In Is the Target

The EU is about to call AWS and Azure gatekeepers

The European Commission is preparing to formally designate AWS and Microsoft Azure as gatekeepers under the EU Digital Markets Act, with a final decision expected in November 2026. It would be the first time the DMA has been applied to a cloud computing company, and the target is specific: how hard it is for a customer to actually leave.

The DMA is EU legislation aimed at reining in anti-competitive behavior among dominant digital platforms. Until now it has mostly been associated with Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon retail and advertising businesses rather than cloud infrastructure. Applying it to AWS and Azure moves the law into the infrastructure layer of the internet, and the obligations that follow are designed around one problem: cloud lock-in.

What the Commission says the problem is

The Commission preliminary findings, sent to both Amazon and Microsoft in June 2026, zero in on the practical barriers to switching cloud providers. Egress fees, the charges for moving data out, are the most visible. But the list is longer: proprietary services with no equivalent elsewhere, technical dependencies baked into architectures, complex licensing terms, and the sheer operational cost of migrating a production system. The result is that customers who want to leave often find they cannot afford to, even when a competitor offers a better price.

If the designation goes ahead as expected, AWS and Azure would have six months to comply with a set of DMA obligations. The details will come with the final decision, but the direction is clear from the preliminary findings: make switching technically and commercially feasible, not merely theoretically possible. The EU Data Act is scheduled to begin phasing out switching charges entirely starting January 2027, which lands just two months after the expected gatekeeper decision. Early 2027 is shaping up to be a consequential stretch for how cloud contracts in Europe actually work.

What Amazon and Microsoft say

Amazon has warned that this kind of regulation could harm investment in the region, framing the obligations as a disincentive to continued infrastructure spending in Europe. It is the standard argument against platform regulation, and it is worth taking seriously: both companies are spending hundreds of billions on data centers, and Europe is competing for that investment. But the Commission case is not that the companies did something wrong in the past. Gatekeeper designation is a forward-looking classification based on market position and structural characteristics, not a finding of past wrongdoing.

The practical question is whether the obligations change anything for customers. The history of platform regulation suggests the answer is slow and partial. Interoperability requirements take years to implement, and incumbents have strong incentives to comply in the narrowest possible way. But the direction of travel matters: the EU is the first regulator to treat cloud lock-in as a competition problem, and other jurisdictions tend to follow its lead.

What it means for cloud customers

For most customers, nothing changes immediately. A November designation means a six-month compliance window, which runs into mid-2027, and the real effects will show up in contract renewals and migration projects after that. But the decision changes the negotiating context now. A customer that can point to a gatekeeper designation and a Data Act phase-out has a stronger hand when asking for egress fee waivers, portability commitments, and exit assistance.

It also sharpens a trend that was already visible. India data law deadline is pushing companies toward sovereign cloud, and AWS is preparing to cut its European sovereign cloud off from the US. Sovereignty, portability, and exit rights are becoming the defining questions of cloud strategy, and the DMA decision would put the weight of EU law behind the customer side of that argument. The cloud giants built their empires on making it easy to move in. The EU is now insisting they make it possible to move out.