On 19 October 2026 the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) published its Leidraad Cloud, a guide to how the EU Data Act applies to cloud switching, interoperability and international data transfers. The headline rule is simple: from 12 January 2027, providers may no longer charge customers for switching. Until then, the ACM's own cloud services page says, they may only charge costs directly tied to the switching process. One caveat first. Trade outlet PPC Land reports the document is a provisional version, open for written responses until 6 November 2026. The details below may therefore still change.
The case for the rule
The strongest argument for this intervention deserves a fair hearing. Cloud customers who build on proprietary services and then face data-extraction fees are not buying in a market where competition disciplines price. They are paying a toll to leave. The European Commission's preliminary view of 25 June 2026 is that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, the largest and second-largest cloud services in the EU, appear to hold an entrenched and durable position, and it cites "lock-in effects and high switching costs" in its DMA announcement. If leaving is expensive, customers tolerate worse prices, weaker terms and slower product improvement. Abolishing the fee attacks that mechanism directly.
What the guide actually requires
The guide is more concrete than its summary suggests. It sorts the Data Act's obligations into four themes: removing obstacles, commercial and contractual duties, technical duties, and international access to non-personal data.
On contracts, it says the terms must set a maximum notice period of two months and a transition period of at most 30 calendar days. Customers must also get at least 30 days to retrieve their data. Providers must commit to continuing the service during the transition.
On cost, the ACM separates two kinds of charge that apply before the ban: data-extraction (egress) fees and fees for technical support. For parallel use, where a customer runs services from several providers at once, data-transfer charges survive after January 2027. They may never exceed the provider's actual cost, and they cover both egress and ingress.
On technology, providers must offer APIs free of charge and without discriminating between customers. Most must also meet harmonised interoperability standards within 12 months of those standards being published in an EU register. Infrastructure-as-a-service providers face a softer test: they must take all reasonable and feasible measures to help customers reach functional equivalence after a switch.
The ACM also says it is the Dutch supervisor for providers whose European headquarters sit in the Netherlands, and it takes reports of violations.
Why the guide is a modest but sound design
The design is better than many of the alternatives on offer. It sets a clear date and a cost-based ceiling for parallel use. It also avoids dictating pricing or architecture. That distinction matters for innovation. A regulator that bans a specific exit toll leaves providers free to compete on performance, price and service quality. A regulator that mandated equivalent products across vendors would freeze product design. The guide largely stays on the right side of that line. Its functional-equivalence duty for infrastructure services is the part to watch, because "reasonable and feasible measures" is the kind of phrase that can be read narrowly or expansively depending on who enforces it.
The guide also sets expectations that outlast the ban. Because contracts must spell out notice periods, transition periods and data portability, customers can negotiate with that information in hand. Procurement teams in Dutch public bodies and mid-sized firms, which often lack leverage against the largest providers, benefit most from standard terms they can point to.
The limits of a fee ban
Here is the sceptical case. Removing a price does not remove the reasons customers stay. The Commission's DMA probe, which began on 18 November 2025 per the Commission's announcement, looks at problems the Data Act does not fix. Its third investigation examines "obstacles to interoperability between cloud computing services, limited or conditioned access for business users to data, tying and bundling services, and potentially imbalanced contractual terms." Those are architectural and commercial lock-in, not fees. A company whose application depends on a provider's managed databases, identity services and machine-learning tooling can have its egress fee waived and still face a rewrite of the code. Free exit helps the customer who already wants to leave. It does little for the customer who cannot afford the engineering time.
There is also a risk on the other side. Providers may recover lost switching revenue through higher base prices or less generous discounts, which would fall on customers who never switch. Evidence from the first year after January 2027 should be tracked before anyone declares the rule a success.
And the two regimes can overlap. The Commission's work with the ACM is described by PPC Land as a joint effort, though I could not confirm that from an ACM or Commission source. If AWS and Azure are designated gatekeepers, they would face DMA obligations on top of the Data Act. Parallel regimes enforced by different bodies raise compliance costs for providers and the risk of conflicting readings. Smaller European cloud firms, the supposed beneficiaries, carry the same Data Act duties and have fewer lawyers to absorb them.
A reasonable test
The sensible approach is to let the Data Act's fee ban take effect, publish switching data, and judge the DMA cases on evidence of foreclosure rather than size. The Netherlands has a credible regulator and a concrete rule. The question for 2027 is not whether customers can leave, but how many do, and whether the resulting competition lowers prices without damaging the quality of the services Dutch businesses rely on.