On Wednesday, Britain’s Ofcom announced its intention to ask the competition regulator to investigate the cloud services market, which is currently dominated by Amazon and Microsoft.
The communications regulator stated that it had identified practices and features that impeded customers from switching and utilizing multiple cloud suppliers. This discovery led it to refer the issue to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority for further investigation.
Amazon and Microsoft hold a collective market share of 60-70%, while Alphabet’s Google is their closest competitor with 5-10%.
“High barriers to switching are already harming competition in what is a fast-growing market,” said Ofcom director Fergal Farragher in a statement.
“We believe that people and businesses who depend on these services require more thorough scrutiny to ensure that they are functioning efficiently,” said Ofcom.
Microsoft said it would continue to engage with Ofcom.
“We remain committed to ensuring the UK cloud industry stays highly competitive. And to supporting the transformative potential of cloud technologies to help accelerate growth across the UK economy,” said a spokesperson for Microsoft.
Ofcom, which launched its probe into cloud services last year. It would publish a final report setting out its findings and recommendations by October.
AWS said customers in Britain were able to choose between a wide variety of providers.
“At AWS (Amazon Web Services), we design our cloud services to give customers the freedom to build the solution that is right for them, with the technology of their choice,” an AWS spokesperson said.
“This has driven increased competition across a range of sectors in the UK economy by broadening access to innovative, highly secure, and scalable IT services.”
