![]() Other estimates suggest its dominance in cloud infrastructure could be even greater. ![]() That means legislators and regulators looking to build such a case will be looking for evidence around three main issues: contract pricing, self-preferencing and the degree to which lock-in is a necessary evil of enterprise software.ĪWS controlled about 34% of the cloud infrastructure service market, according to Synergy Research group. Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets." While that report focused much more on advertising and AWS' corporate parent than it did the cloud, it also echoed a number of concerns about AWS that have been sweeping through the market for years: the treasure trove of data inside its network that's both difficult and expensive to move elsewhere, the rate at which some AWS customers found the company competing with them and more of the usual self-serving grumbling from enterprise companies built around open-source projects that somebody else is also using the same permissively-licensed code to make money.Īny actual antitrust case against AWS would require much more of a smoking gun than was produced by the Committee's report, according to antitrust experts. Last October, the House Judiciary Committee included cloud computing in a report entitled " ![]() "Short answer is: If it is a platform, then it has antitrust issues," Donald Polden, dean emeritus and professor of law at Santa Clara University, told Protocol. But as the stakes grow larger, it's hard to overlook the competitive dynamics at play in the market for enterprise software, which runs the world. The ins and outs of business-to-business tech markets such as the cloud industry aren't immediately accessible to most legislators, who are still trying (with varying degrees of success) to wrap their heads around consumer tech markets. But by most metrics, AWS is by far considered the leader when it comes to selling that infrastructure as a service, controlling as much as 45% of that market according to some estimates. A generation of tech companies found themselves more than willing to pay handsomely to outsource their hardware and networking needs - as well as an ever-growing percentage of their software development tools - to the company.ĪWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud have all invested billions of dollars in cloud infrastructure, demonstrating that big business can run over the internet. The days of AWS flying under the antitrust radar are over.Ĭloud computing has grown at a dizzying speed since 2006, when AWS launched its first cloud service.
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