Regulators around the globe pay attention as results of 21-month cloud probe published

Britain's competition regulator says Microsoft and AWS are using their dominance to harm UK cloud customers and proposes to designate both with strategic market status (SMS) to take action against them.

Nothing ever happens quickly in the world of watchdogs and following a 21-month investigation into the health of the local landscape, and a provisional finding in January that "competition is not working as well as it could," here we are.

An SMS designation would allow the CMA to introduce targeted measures to tackle the multiple concerns it found.

In an eight-page summary [PDF], the CMA says that market concentration is "particularly high" in the case of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and the two largest providers in the UK – Microsoft and AWS – hold "significant unilateral market power" to earn returns above the cost of their capital over a sustained period.

Microsoft and AWS each made up roughly 30 ...