The U.K.’s Office of Communications said Wednesday that it is proposing a cloud market investigation as a study by the regulator has uncovered practices and features that could limit competition, and that it is particularly concerned about the practices of Amazon
AMZN,
and Microsoft
MSFT,
because of their dominant market position.
The regulator said competition could deteriorate further in a critical digital market for the U.K. economy if left unaddressed. High fees for transferring data out, committed spend discounts and technical restrictions are making it hard for business customers to switch cloud provider or use multiple providers, it said.
Areas for concern include egress fees, technical restrictions on interoperability and committed spend discounts.
In the U.K., Amazon Web Services and Microsoft have a combined market share of 60%-70% and Google is their closest competitor with 5%-10%, Ofcom said.
Ofcom said it has proposed to refer the cloud infrastructure market to the Competition and Markets Authority to carry out an investigation.
Feedback is being invited by May 17 and it plans to publish a final report by no later than Oct. 5.
Write to Kyle Morris at kyle.morris@dowjones.com
This post was originally published on Market Watch
