Tech Policy Press - How the UK Retreated on Cloud and Called Its Local Media Band-Aid a Plan
Open Markets Institute Center for Journalism and Liberty director Courtney Radsch argued that the UK failed to meaningfully address the dominance of hyperscale cloud providers, criticizing regulators for relying on voluntary commitments rather than structural remedies despite clear evidence of concentrated market power.
Last week, the UK government made two announcements about the information economy that few saw as connected, but which portend little change in the underlying power that US tech platforms play in Britain. On March 26, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy unveiled Amplify, the government's local media action plan, the first in a generation. A few days later, on March 31, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced the outcome of its three-year investigation into the cloud computing market. Both announcements came packaged in the language of decisive action, but neither delivered what it promised.
Cloud computing
The gap between what the CMA found and what it did is deeply disappointing given hopes for its potential to meaningfully address strategic market status and the very obvious dominance of American hyperscalers in the cloud market. This was particularly surprising given the growing awareness about the threats that this dependence creates for digital sovereignty amid increased American pressure and belligerence.
When Ofcom referred the UK cloud market for investigation in October 2023, the reason for concern was straightforward: Amazon and Microsoft together control between 70 and 80 percent of UK cloud infrastructure (with Google a distant third). The way they structure licensing, egress fees, and interoperability makes it expensive and difficult for customers to go anywhere else. The investigation confirmed all of this (which we have also highlighted extensively, including the implications for investigative journalism), with the CMA's July 2025 final report concluding that competition in the market was not working well and that both companies held significant unilateral market power. It recommended the board consider designating both Amazon and Microsoft with Strategic Market Status, a designation under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act that would give the regulator binding powers to impose conduct requirements and structural remedies.
The board blinked. What emerged last week was not what the investigation recommended. Amazon got no designation, no formal probe, no binding requirements—just voluntary commitments on egress fees and interoperability, negotiated in private and announced with press releases. Microsoft got a new SMS investigation, but not into cloud, where the competition concerns were documented and severe. It got a probe into its business software ecosystem (Word, Excel, Teams, Copilot) that won't even reach a provisional finding for another nine months. The cloud inquiry chair had already resigned a month earlier over the “glacial” pace of reform and concerns about the agency's independence. Mark Boost, CEO of UK cloud provider Civo, summed up concerns about the outcome, calling it "a repeat of the provisional decision, but with softer edges." The former deputy government Chief Information Officer called it "intent, but not urgency."
The lack of urgency matters not just in cloud markets but for the economy writ large. Last year, the Open Markets Institute and the Center for Journalism and Liberty submitted formal comments to the CMA's SMS investigation into Google's search services, arguing that behavioral remedies alone are insufficient to address structural dominance. The history of Google's conduct in France, where the Autorité de la Concurrence spent years chasing the company for failing to comply with its own commitments, illustrates why. The CMA's cloud outcome is a live demonstration of why voluntary commitments from companies with 30-40 percent market share each, reviewed in six months at the regulator's discretion, are unlikely to be meaningful remedies. They are deferrals dressed up as progress and pose broader threats to the information ecosystem that the CMA failed to grapple with.
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