Today’s announcement by the European Commission to open three market investigations on cloud computing under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) is welcome and overdue news.
ARTICLE 19 believes that the Commission is right to open these investigations. It may also appear surprising that Google does not feature among the firms under qualitative designation review, though such an assessment may yet follow. The sequencing may simply be down to limited administrative capacity and mindful that only last week the Commission opened an investigation into a potential DMA breach by Google in demoting media publishers’ content in search results.
What matters about today’s announcement is that the third investigation focuses on the question of whether the existing rules require adaptation through delegated acts, an important reminder that the EU legislator always intended the DMA to be forward-looking and therefore equipped the Commission with substantial powers of adjustment.
And while we would urge for a market investigation to assess whether AI-related services as such ought to be added to the DMA’s scope and would regard it as a valuable and necessary next step, we applaud the Commission for its expeditious response to topics that we set out in detail in the ARTICLE 19 report published as our contribution to the Commission’s DMA review consultation. The deadline for submissions only ended on 24 September 2025.
While the qualitative designation of Microsoft and Amazon is unlikely to pose significant analytical difficulty, the third investigation is more demanding, as it concerns the conditions under which the DMA may be extended through delegated acts. It must also be assessed whether such extensions will suffice or whether, at a later stage, a legislative amendment of the DMA may prove necessary, a prospect that would inevitably entail longer timelines. What this process already makes clear, however, is that the underlying principles of the DMA remain entirely robust and that its objectives of contestability and fairness retain their full relevance.
We hope that the Commission will be able to reach well-founded conclusions rapidly and recognise that in this endeavour, decisive support from national competition authorities will be essential; thus far, many have remained comparatively passive.