The cut and the timing
The 2027 budget presented on Prinsjesdag reduces funding for the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) from 2028 onwards. The Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP), the data protection authority, faces deeper cuts. According to the Consumentenbond's reaction, the AP's budget falls from about €60 million in 2026 to €56.83 million in 2027 and below €49 million a year from 2028. The AP says it needs roughly €100 million to do its job. I found no verified figure for the size of the ACM cut, so I make no claim about it here.
The strongest case for the cuts
The case for restraint deserves a fair hearing. A government facing a tight fiscal outlook has to prioritise, and regulators are not exempt from efficiency demands. An authority that expands indefinitely can also become a source of regulatory uncertainty in its own right. The cuts start in 2028, so they do not touch current casework. It is also fair to say that money is not the same as output: a well-focused regulator can achieve more than a large, diffuse one.
Why the timing is hard to defend
The cuts arrive when the Dutch regulator is carrying unusual weight in European enforcement. On 25 June 2026, the European Commission announced a preliminary position that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure should be designated as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act for their cloud services. The Commission described them as the largest and second-largest cloud services in the EU, and pointed to high switching costs, lock-in effects and their role in AI tools. The ACM is part of the joint investigation with the Commission.
This is a novel use of the DMA. Cloud is not a consumer app, and market investigations of this kind depend on technical expertise that is expensive to build and hard to replace. If the designation is confirmed, national authorities will be expected to contribute to monitoring compliance for years. That is precisely the period in which the ACM's funding shrinks.
The ACM's own diagnosis
The ACM has been direct about the stakes. In its 2026 digital economy priorities, chair Martijn Snoep says that dependence on large, mostly non-European tech firms calls for robust oversight. The regulator also plans to study the obstacles that organisations face in reducing their reliance on particular cloud and ICT services, and to give policymakers recommendations. Reporting from March 2026 adds that the ACM sees real digital autonomy as starting with markets where organisations can meaningfully choose and switch between providers.
That framing is the pro-innovation one. Switching costs, egress fees and contractual lock-in are barriers to entry. They make it harder for Dutch and European cloud start-ups to compete and for customers to negotiate. Competition enforcement that lowers those barriers is closer to market-opening than to heavy-handed regulation.
Proportionality cuts both ways
Our editorial position favours proportionate, evidence-based regulation, and we have been sceptical of the DMA's expansion into new sectors. A gatekeeper designation for cloud should rest on demonstrated market power and not on political anxiety about American firms. The Commission's preliminary view is only that: preliminary, with the companies entitled to respond. Whether AWS and Azure meet the qualitative designation criteria despite not meeting the quantitative thresholds is a fair question for the process to test.
But proportionality is an argument for careful enforcement, not for thin enforcement. Case-by-case competition analysis, the kind the ACM does, is the alternative to blunt ex ante rules. If the government wants regulators to rely on evidence and targeted remedies rather than sweeping obligations, it has to fund the analysts who gather that evidence. Cutting capacity while the DMA cloud process is running risks leaving the Netherlands with the rules but not the staff to apply them well. That is the worst combination for businesses, who face uncertainty, and for consumers, who see little benefit.
The AP's position illustrates the risk. An authority that says it needs about €100 million and is instead heading below €49 million will triage. Triage tends to favour high-profile fines over the slower supervisory work that helps companies comply in advance.
What to watch
- Whether parliament amends the ACM and AP allocations during budget deliberations.
- Whether the Commission confirms the cloud designations, and how much work it delegates to national authorities.
- Whether the ACM's cloud-switching recommendations reach government procurement, where the state itself is a large buyer.
The Netherlands can reasonably debate how big its regulators should be. It should not make that decision by default, in the middle of the most consequential digital competition case in Europe.