Ofcom has proposed to refer the UK cloud sector to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to investigate possible risks to consumers.
The regulator has been investigating the market dominance of cloud "hyperscalers", namely Amazon's AWS and Microsoft's Azure, which together hold approximately 60 to 70 per cent of the cloud services market share. Google is their closest competitor with a share of somewhere between 5 and 10 per cent.
The results of this investigation have shown that the two companies' practices “could limit competition” and make it more difficult for users to switch providers, Ofcom has said.
The regulator pointed out that the two massive suppliers charge “significantly higher” fees than smaller providers to move data out of the cloud and to another company’s servers. Moreover, the two companies also prevent some of their services from working effectively alongside those from other suppliers.
“There is a risk...