A Threshold Law Without a Threshold
On June 25, 2026, the European Commission told Amazon and Microsoft it preliminarily views Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act — even though neither service clears the DMA's own quantitative bar for designation. The Commission calls AWS and Azure "the largest and second largest cloud computing services in the EU" and says they function as "an important gateway between businesses and their customers in the EU" (European Commission, June 25, 2026). It is the first time cloud infrastructure has been pulled into the DMA regime, and the first time gatekeeper status has been applied to a company that does not meet the law's own numbers.
That second fact is the story. The DMA was built around bright-line thresholds — annual EU turnover, market capitalization, active user counts — precisely so that gatekeeper status would not turn on regulators' discretion. Bypassing that bar for AWS and Azure means the Commission is now designating by judgment call, not by formula.
The Dutch Angle
What makes this a Netherlands story is procedural, not incidental. The Commission ran the underlying market investigations jointly with the Netherlands' Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) — the first time the Commission and a national competition authority have worked together in this way on a DMA case (ACM, 2026). ACM has since endorsed the preliminary finding, stating the cloud services "form an important gateway between businesses and users in the digital economy" and framing the DMA's goal as "creating a level playing field for all digital companies, regardless of their size" (ACM, June 25, 2026). ACM's own 2026 enforcement agenda lists the cloud probe as a named priority, alongside domestic cases against Snapchat and online marketplace Bol — signaling the regulator sees this as a template, not a one-off (ACM 2026 Agenda).
The joint-investigation-team model matters beyond this case. It gives national regulators like ACM a formal seat inside Commission-level DMA enforcement, and gives the Commission local market expertise and legal capacity it doesn't always have in-house. Expect other national authorities to seek the same arrangement on future gatekeeper cases.
Steelmanning the Designation
The Commission's case is not frivolous. Enterprise cloud markets genuinely exhibit lock-in: egress fees, proprietary APIs, and bundled AI tooling raise real switching costs for business customers, and a two-firm race for AI infrastructure dominance plausibly forecloses smaller European cloud and AI entrants who need compute access on fair terms. If AI capability is now the deciding factor in enterprise cloud procurement — as the Commission argues — then a regulatory framework written before the AI boom may reasonably need to extend to firms whose market power comes from an ecosystem effect the original thresholds never anticipated. A regulator watching two American firms control the substrate that every European AI startup must build on has a legitimate competition concern, not merely a protectionist reflex.
Where the Case Overreaches
But the DMA's numerical thresholds exist for a reason: predictability. Firms need to know in advance whether gatekeeper obligations — interoperability mandates, data-portability requirements, restrictions on self-preferencing — will apply to them, because those obligations reshape product design, pricing, and security architecture months before any violation occurs. A designation regime that can reach below its own stated bar whenever the Commission judges a market "important enough" turns a compliance question into a political one. That unpredictability lands hardest on cloud providers investing in EU data-center capacity and AI infrastructure — investment the EU says it wants more of, not less.
There is also a category problem. The DMA's core gatekeeper obligations were built for consumer-facing platforms — app stores, search, social messaging — where switching costs are borne by individual users with little bargaining power. Enterprise cloud contracts are negotiated business-to-business, often with sophisticated procurement teams and multi-cloud strategies already in place. Applying the same interoperability and self-preferencing playbook to enterprise infrastructure risks solving a retail-platform problem with an industrial-cloud hammer, degrading the security and performance advantages of vertically integrated cloud-AI stacks without a clear competitive payoff for European firms.
What Happens Next
Amazon and Microsoft can submit written representations before the Commission finalizes the designation; a final decision is expected later in 2026. If confirmed, both companies would have six months to bring AWS and Azure into DMA compliance. Given the threshold question at the center of this case, a legal challenge before the EU courts on the scope of gatekeeper designation itself looks more likely than a fight over any individual obligation — and that fight will determine whether the DMA's thresholds mean anything going forward, in cloud markets and beyond.