Amazon, Microsoft’s Cloud Services Should Fall Under DMA, EU Says

DMA Classification: What Gatekeeper Status Means

The Digital Markets Act targets platforms with entrenched market positions in core digital services. Gatekeeper designation triggers a compliance checklist: no bundling cloud services with adjacent products, mandatory data export at user request, and restrictions on using customer data to compete against them. If AWS and Azure qualify, the downstream effect touches every merchant relying on their compute, storage, or analytics layers.

Current DMA gatekeepers already include Alphabet, Meta, Apple, ByteDance, and Microsoft for certain OS and browser segments. Adding cloud infrastructure expands the scope to the foundational layer of e-commerce operations — the servers, databases, and APIs processing transactions at scale.

E-Commerce Infrastructure Impact

Three operational vectors matter for online retail:

• Data portability. Gatekeeper rules mandate that users can extract their data in a usable format. For brands running proprietary analytics or customer data platforms on AWS or Azure, this reduces vendor lock-in friction. Migration cost — measured in engineering hours and downtime risk — drops structurally.
• Interoperability requirements. Cloud services classified as gatekeepers cannot impose technical barriers preventing third-party tools from connecting. This affects integrations between payment processors, inventory systems, and marketing automation stacks hosted across providers.
• Self-preferencing restrictions. AWS and Azure could face limits on prioritizing their own services within their ecosystems. A merchant using AWS Lambda might see more competitive pricing pressure as Amazon cannot automatically default to its own fulfillment or advertising APIs.

Compliance Timeline and Unknowns

No confirmed date for formal designation has been reported. EU Commission reviews typically run 45–90 days from preliminary assessment to final decision, but enforcement timelines remain unconfirmed in current reports.

The critical unknown: whether AWS and Azure will be classified as gatekeepers for cloud broadly or segmented by specific service categories — compute, storage, database, AI/ML inference. The distinction determines whether a merchant's entire stack falls under DMA constraints or only isolated components.

What to track: Commission statements on designation scope, AWS and Azure response filings, and any technical compliance roadmaps published ahead of enforcement. For e-commerce operators architecting multi-cloud or hybrid setups, this ruling adds a regulatory variable to infrastructure cost modeling.