The UK’s competition regulator is looking into the country’s cloud services market to find out if companies are engaging in anti-competitive practices. Microsoft and Amazon are by far the biggest players in the market.
Officials are concerned that it’s too difficult for customers to switch to another provider.
Microsoft and Amazon are facing more antitrust scrutiny. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) says it will investigate the cloud services market in the country to determine if companies are engaging in anti-competitive practices.
Amazon (through Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft are by far the biggest players in that field in the UK. Between them, they had a market share of between 70 and 80 percent last year, according to a report from media regulator Ofcom, which asked the CMA to investigate the market. Google is in third place with a relatively paltry share of between five and 10 percent.
Ofcom believes that competition in the market is constrained by a number of factors that make it hard for customers to switch suppliers or use more than one at the same time. A key issue is egress fees, which customers often have to pay to transfer their data to another service. “The cost of transferring data between rival providers can discourage customers from using more than one cloud provider and in some cases make switching more costly,” Ofcom said in its report.
