United Kingdom: Announced Ofcom referral of cloud services market to CMA for competition investigation

On 5 October 2023, the Office of Communications (Ofcom) announced it had referred the public cloud infrastructure services market to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) for further investigation. The referral follows Ofcom's study into cloud services in the UK to assess how the market is working and to identify any potential competition concerns. In particular, the market study identified concerns regarding egress fees, technical barriers to interoperability and portability, and committed spend discounts. The study also found that Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft are the leading providers of cloud infrastructure services in the UK with a combined market share of 70-80%. The CMA will now conduct an independent investigation to decide whether there is an adverse effect on competition, and if so, whether it should take action or recommend others to take action.