AWS and Azure Face EU Gatekeeper Designation Under Digital Markets Act
The Development
On June 25, 2026, the European Commission notified Amazon and Microsoft of its preliminary position that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure should each be designated as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act. The DMA designation process requires companies to formally respond before a final decision is issued, but preliminary positions have consistently converted to full designations in every prior DMA proceeding. AWS and Azure collectively underpin the majority of enterprise marketing technology infrastructure in Europe, including data clean rooms, CDP deployments, programmatic bidding infrastructure, and cloud-based measurement platforms. Designation would impose interoperability requirements, data portability mandates, self-preferencing prohibitions, and ongoing compliance audits — obligations that have already reshaped how Meta Platforms and Alphabet operate their advertising businesses across the EU.
Our Take
This is the logical extension of the DMA's trajectory and it lands directly inside marketing operations. The prior gatekeeper designations targeted surfaces — search, social, app stores — where advertising inventory lives. AWS and Azure designation targets the pipes. Martech stacks, identity graphs, data clean rooms, and measurement infrastructure built on these platforms now sit inside a regulated framework that compels openness. That sounds beneficial in principle, but the practical effect is compliance overhead that disproportionately burdens enterprises already navigating fragmented data governance across markets. The more significant read: this accelerates the multicloud conversation from a technical preference to a strategic necessity, and it gives EU-based cloud competitors a structural opening they did not have before last week.
What Changed
For the first time, cloud infrastructure providers face the same class of structural behavioral obligations previously reserved for consumer-facing platforms. Regulators now have a legal mechanism to enforce interoperability and data portability at the infrastructure layer, not just the application layer.
Marketing Impact
Marketing operations and martech teams running EU data infrastructure on AWS or Azure face imminent compliance reviews. Data clean room architectures, CDP configurations, and any infrastructure relying on proprietary AWS or Azure data services will require legal and technical audit against incoming DMA obligations.
Competitive Implication
EU-headquartered cloud providers and multicloud infrastructure vendors gain a structural opening as enterprise buyers reassess single-vendor dependency. AWS and Azure professional services revenues face margin pressure as customers fund compliance restructuring rather than platform expansion.
Strategic Outlook
Final gatekeeper designation is likely within six to nine months given the Commission's prior procedural pace. Expect AWS and Azure to contest scope definitions aggressively, particularly around which specific services fall under designation — that boundary fight is where the real commercial stakes sit.
The Exploit
Action Item
Heads of marketing technology with EU data infrastructure should commission a dependency audit against their AWS or Azure stack now, before designation finalizes and compliance timelines compress — the window to restructure contracts on favorable terms closes once obligations are confirmed.