EU to soon classify AWS and Azure as gatekeepers under DSA | Hacker News Reader

EU to soon classify AWS and Azure as gatekeepers under DSA

heise.de

66 pointssnowpid26 comments

> The trigger was outages in cloud services with sometimes significant impacts on other internet services. Shortly before, an approximately 15-hour outage of the AWS cloud in the US meant that not only Amazon's own streaming services but also Atlassian, Docker, Epic Games, and the Signal messenger were unavailable or severely restricted.

If I remember correctly, it was a us-east-1 issue specifically. Why is everyone hosted in us-east-1, especially in Europe where stable and reliable regions are available (eu-west-1, eu-west-3, ...)?

The issue originated in us-east-1 but had a huge blast radius beyond that - e.g. it took SES down.

Lots of AWS’s control surfaces are in us-east-1, and (not calling out any specific instances here) sometimes what’s call an “AWS outage” especially regarding us-east-1, is actually a limitation on accessing those control surfaces, ie, making changes to assets that are actually hosted elsewhere.

In such cases the services continue to operate as-is despite problems in us-east-1.

Not saying that’s not a problem, just, clarifying the scope.

Historically, AWS own infrastructure relies on us-east-1. Loosing us-east-1 usually means loosing many other AWS Global services which are required for services in other regions to be healthy.

insane that aws doesn't have zonal redundancy for their own systems

Yeah, they should move their stuff to the cloud.

How could a cloud provider *not* qualify as a gatekeeper under these guidelines?

Because the threshold was designed around consumer-facing services and requires 45 million monthly users.

However the regulation also has flexibility if something is deemed critical but doesn't meet the numbers.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?toc=OJ%3AL%3...

(chapter 2, requirements are point #2 and exceptions to those are #8)

If a multinational utility operates power grids in both the EU and the US, and a European company chooses to import power from the US grid, I don't know why EU would penalize the utility when the US grid has an outage. They really should be penalizing their European entities for failing to architect a local redundancy.

If EU's going to use this as an excuse to designate them as gatekeepers, maybe they should just block EU accounts from provisioning resources outside of Europe. These providers are taking all the blame for architectural decisions made entirely by their customers.

I think you just made some strong arguments for classifying them as gatekeepers. The idea, like you said, is to make it so that competitors can enter the market and pick up the slack in areas where AWS and Azure are dropping the ball.

A good target for regulation of those clouds would be the inflated traffic pricing.

Either by a simple price limit on ordinary egress (e.g. max 1 EUR / TB to European providers which don't charge for peering/traffic), or by requiring them to peer at-cost with others and allowing the customers to choose such a peering for egress.

The current traffic pricing is extremely high, and makes it difficult to split your cloud installation between multiple providers.

Traffic pricing has to be understood as being, at least in part, a control against free-riding on the provider's networking architecture. The Data Act already gives EU customers a right to egress their data to another provider at cost, which all major cloud providers have implemented. But that doesn't (and shouldn't) mean that they have to give you a marginal-cost-only CDN.

They should classify the ICANN and the RIRs as gatekeepers too, they are the biggest ones.

It’s a very thin and a political line between being a gatekeeper and a very successful company.

Are we soon going to say Spotify, ASML, and Carl Zeiss are also gatekeepers?

In the age of staple shenanigans from the US with tariffs and AI prohibition, I find this to be an adequate response.

For ASML and Carl Zeiss (which I didn't know about), it seems like a stretch from what I can read about them.

But for Spotify, why not?

> It’s a very thin and a political line between being a gatekeeper and a very successful company.

Of course.

If you are a tech company that becomes as successful as to be a monopoly or a participant in an oligopoly with a strong network effect, why wouldn't you be recognized as a gatekeeper?

> But for Spotify, why not?

Spotify is subject to the DSA already which sits parallel to the DMA and focuses on content moderation, transparency in advertising etc.

The argument for making them subject to the DMA is flakey because there has to be actual gatekeeping, you can export your playlists and data and import them to competing services with identical catalogues.

> If you are a tech company that becomes as successful as to be a monopoly or a participant in an oligopoly with a strong network effect, why wouldn't you be recognized as a gatekeeper?

Exactly. There are numerous monopolies that are scumming resources and wealth out of masses and not being tackled either because they’re owned by the right people or they’re strategically important. Then the discussion about how monopolies are bad and that’s why we’re addressing them becomes a mute argument. It’s supposed to be a government of the people, but sometimes it’s using it as an excuse to serve the interests of the few in right places, and not the successful companies.

Do Zeiss provide digital services? If not, then how are they a digital markets act gatekeeper?

Americans may be used to political characterisation by arbitrary whim of the President, but the EU actually has a process. You can read the decisions: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers-portal_...

Rules for gatekeepers: https://www.eu-digital-markets-act.com/Digital_Markets_Act_A...

> turnover equal to or above EUR 7,5 billion in each of the last three financial years, or where its average market capitalisation or its equivalent fair market value amounted to at least EUR 75 billion in the last financial year, and it provides the same core platform service in at least three Member States

> a core platform service that in the last financial year has at least 45 million monthly active end users established or located in the Union and at least 10 000 yearly active business users established in the Union

Explainer: https://www.grantthornton.ie/insights/factsheets/determining...

I was pointing out the arbitrary and political nature of the decisions being made.

A company being a monopoly is a problem, unless it’s a European one like ASML etc. Then it’s a technology they built over the years and they should reap the benefits of it.

Which one is it, are monopolies bad or the markets, digital or not, defined by how much European involvement and ownership it contains? Or is DMA a tool to catchup in certain markets by curbing the external parties?

> It’s a very thin and a political line between being a gatekeeper and a very successful company.

Honestly, I'm fine with just placing extra requirements on very successful companies.

But this is bad for small companies because... paper rustling... because no one will invest in them if they can't become unregulated big companies!

Is that not the point? Exceptions for newcomers, strong customer protections against established players

I think that’s how it started but turned into we need to take a cut of your business.

Markets should be defined clearly and monopolies or institutions that suck wealth out of nations should be controlled, regardless of their origin, the US or not.

Is this really a good faith comment? Anyway the EU just fines US tech giants, it's part of doing business in the EU. It must be worthwhile, the fines must only amount to a small percentage of the lucre gathered there.

Digital Markets Act was supposed to define markets and allow competition, however it quickly turned into some existing monopolies putting their fingers into some American businesses and not addressing the main issues.

Whenever a successful European company like ASML is mentioned in the same context of monopolies due to their earned success in the semiconductor industry, then none of the market control (and I’m not just talking about digital markets here) goes out of the window.

Then I keep asking myself, are monopolies a bad thing that needs to be regulated because they can kill innovation and suck resources from nations, or does that only apply when it’s certain American companies only when they threatening the benefits of certain oligarchs.

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