EU To Soon Classify AWS and Azure As Gatekeepers Under DSA (heise.de)
- Reference: 0183995056
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/06/19/1643240/eu-to-soon-classify-aws-and-azure-as-gatekeepers-under-dsa
- Source link: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Report-EU-to-soon-classify-AWS-and-Azure-as-gatekeepers-under-DSA-11337873.html
> This investigation began in November 2025, when the EU targeted the cloud power of US tech giants. The trigger was outages in cloud services with sometimes significant impacts on other internet services. Shortly before, an approximately 15-hour outage of the AWS cloud in the US meant that not only Amazon's own streaming services but also Atlassian, Docker, Epic Games, and the Signal messenger were unavailable or severely restricted. Shortly thereafter, Microsoft Azure also struggled with an outage, preventing air passengers from checking in and interrupting votes in the Scottish Parliament.
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> As a result, European antitrust authorities have also scrutinized cloud services under the Digital Markets Act for the first time. The major cloud providers, primarily from the US, have so far evaded the EU's Digital Markets Act because a large part of their business is handled through corporate contracts. This makes it difficult to determine the number of individual users. However, this is one of the EU's most important criteria for determining the market power of companies. [...] As gatekeepers, AWS and Azure would be obliged to ensure interoperability and data portability. This would, for example, simplify switching cloud providers and allow customers to link other services with AWS or Azure clouds, instead of being limited to AWS and Azure offerings. Significant fines could also be imposed if the cloud services are found to be in violation of existing regulations.
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Report-EU-to-soon-classify-AWS-and-Azure-as-gatekeepers-under-DSA-11337873.html
Other nations will follow (Score:5, Interesting)
When IT becomes a national soverienty issue, these kinds of regulations will become absolutely essential.
Because yeah ,, a cloud outage in the US shutting down government services in Europe and elsewhere is a security problem since it could also be done maliciously.
Think of a hypothetical where the alternative systems to GPS (American) didn't exist (e.g. GLONASS and Galileo) and the US decided to shut down positioning service in the EU because (of reasons that aren't important) . It would fuck with air travel, emergency services, people navigating cities, all that. The lack of a domestic or alternative provider would be massively disruptive.
Same with these cloud services ..
Re: (Score:2)
> a cloud outage in the US shutting down government services in Europe and elsewhere
My guess is that the US companies have data centers in Europe so an outage in the US would not affect Europe.
However I do not think that negates your point of being dependent on a foreign company or failing to have redundancy.
Your example of redundant Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) is a great example of redundancy benefiting everyone; I love having a GNSS chip that supports all three chips even if I am in the US.
Although cloud providers have always felt like they had pretty good interoperability
Re: (Score:2)
You're right, CSPs have regional centers and outages are usually regional. But outages are a pretty flimsy excuse to hang this on generally. There were global outages that impacted everybody, so they're going to change the competition rules? That doesn't even make sense! And none of this would address the issues you cited. Regulating them as "gatekeepers" (what gate?) won't increase redundancy. It won't change dependency on foreign providers.
And, as you pointed out, it isn't actually hard to migra
Agreed (Score:2)
I think you and I are in agreement.
In general I would assert that government regulation is absolutely the wrong solution.
This appears be no exception to that rule and driven by ulterior motives.
I am sure their is some incompetence on the law makers side, they do not understand how cloud computing works; but even if they did all they want is more power anyway.
Re: Other nations will follow (Score:2)
AWS us-east-1 had an issue last year. us-east-1 is also the "Global" region, so this affected IAM Roles (among other "global" services) across the entire world. Everyone was affected until the issue was resolved.
What about the people put out of business? (Score:2)
There are companies that specialize in migrating businesses from one platform to another. Is the EU trying to shut them down?
Re: (Score:2)
Not necessarily, people will need help to migrate from aws /O365Google workplaces ( or whatever the call it today), To the new EU solution and people will allso need to sync data between the eu cloud and one of the others for cloud redundancy, because as we have seen relying on nonly one cloud (even multiple availability regions from the same provider) might not be enough (looking at you AWS)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, if those companies are American.
Re: (Score:2)
> Is the EU trying to shut them down?
I'm trying to figure out if you're serious. In case you are: no. I work for such a company BTW.
EU capacity (Score:1)
The EU, or Europe, does not appear to have the capacity to do everything it wants to do. At the moment, it wants to have super generous social welfare, vastly increase its military to defend against Russia, zero out its dependence on fossil fuels, zero out its nuclear power, replace every US service it uses by investing capital equal to US to provide those services, and at the same time fight off competition from China, all with a shrinking population of Europeans, and invasion of migrants from 3rd world
What are they trying to do? (Score:2)
Outages happen. How does reclassifying CSPs change that? The servers are already regional. It's already pretty straightforward to migrate between them (because each wants it to be easy to move to theirs). 365 is loaded with things that can connect to AWS (and I assume vice versa). Since interop exists and the data is all portable (getting ready to do a migration myself), what's left? What else is mentioned, finding out the number of users? This won't do that either!
So, what problem are they trying t
Are you...? (Score:2)
I am Vinz, Vinz Clortho, Keymaster of Gozer...Volguus Zildrohoar, Lord of the Seboullia.
"Progressive" is a euphemism (Score:1)
Europe offers a progressive approach to work-life balance through widespread four-day work week initiatives and strict labor laws that make firing employees significantly harder than in the US. These rights prioritize job security and personal well-being over corporate flexibility. Who would have thought it had a side effect of being less productive?
Re: The EU is a SAFETY CULT && Rapist Migr (Score:2)
I can drive to Brussels. Park my car next to the EU buildings and shout just that. Plenty of weirdos in Brussels. One more or less? Who cares.
Re: "Progressive" is a euphemism (Score:2)
Which EU countries has a four day work week? 5 days seams to be the norm
4dayweek.io (Score:2)
According to [1]https://4dayweek.io/countries [4dayweek.io] it looks like the average work week is under 40 hours for most European countries.
Now sure you can stretch 32.5 hours out over 5 days working 6.5 hours a day, but I am assuming a minimum of 8 hour work days; so less than 40 hours is not filling 5 days.
[1] https://4dayweek.io/countries
Re: "Progressive" is a euphemism (Score:2)
Yep. 40 hour weeks are still the norm here. And 20 days statuary holiday/vacation days (on top on national holidays).
Re: (Score:2)
We also have pensions, weekends, maximum working hours per day and no child labor. And public fire departments.
All of those were introduced by socialists.
Re: (Score:3)
The difficulty is completeng wit US megaclouds from US mega providers, that have become entrenched. I mean Microsoft could probably drop several hundred bn, on dcs all over Europe next year, no singel European competitor has that kind of clout, and we also don't have the SaaS stack to compete with O365 yet (well at least not until a few days ago) Which is partly why the EU kicked off the EuroOffice project, but in a transition period some temporary regulation might be needed to level the playing field. Als
Re: (Score:2)
Simple. Europeans who could do so come to the US to do so.