UK Scrutinizes Amazon, Google, Microsoft Over Competition in Cloud Market

The U.K. has begun probing the cloud market to see whether Amazon, Microsoft and Google are stifling competition and innovation.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google are referred to as “hyperscalers” because of the size of the data centers they use to process and store data. The three services make up around 81% of the revenues in the £15 billion ($15.8 billion) U.K. cloud market, a Financial Times report says.

Communications regulator Ofcom said the cloud sector was still evolving and it would “look at how the market is working today and how we expect it to develop in the future — aiming to identify any potential competition concerns early to prevent them becoming embedded as the market matures.”

Microsoft said it looked “forward to contributing” to the study. Amazon and Google didn’t respond to a request for comment from PYMNTS.

This probe comes as European authorities are looking more into Big Tech and various streaming companies and the effects these corporations are having on domestic markets.

Cloud computing makes it so individuals and companies can process and store data remotely without using any of their own server and computing equipment. The services have increasingly been outsourced to hyperscaler cloud providers in the last few years.

There have been a multitude of calls to rein in Big Tech’s influence on things in general, with over a dozen tech companies whose products offer alternatives to those provided by the tech giants coming out in favor of more regulations.

Read more: Smaller Tech Firms Back Measure to Rein in Big Tech Competitors

PYMNTS wrote that several companies signed a letter to that effect, including DuckDuckGo, which offers a privacy-focused search engine to compete with Google, and Mozilla, which has competed with Microsoft’s internet browsers for years.

“Massive tech platforms can exert influence over society and the digital economy because they ultimately have the power to collect, analyze, and monetize exorbitant amounts of personal information,” the letter says.

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