I mean… there’s a simple reason. Running a fuck-off huge data center - let alone a few dozen spread around the world - takes a similarly fuck-off huge amount of capital investment. Doubly so at the beginning, when AWS wasn’t really a thing yet. Only huge companies with a specific interest in hosting compute would be able to do it. Thus: Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are far and away the market leaders. Apple probably could have done it too, but it’s not an area they care about, because their whole business model is about vertical integration, and hosting VMs and baremetal and any number of other things that aren’t locked into osX is antithetical to Apple’s whole thing.

Lol GCP.

When not being a part of the antitrust investigation is an insult.

UK government want to see all your data. Is this just a shot across the bows, because it’s comes off incredibly stupid given the context of what a cloud environment provides, i.e. massive amounts of easily accessed very expensive hardware, and there are boutique options out there…

Or maybe they’d like to bring shared computing infrastructure into the hands of the people, nationalised cloud, mmm sounds good!

I’m sure this will go about as well as when they went after microsofts Activision blizzard purchase. Even if the regulator says one thing, Microsoft has enough strings they can pull to get it resinded in a historic first

This is the best summary I could come up with:

LONDON, Oct 3 (Reuters) - British media regulator Ofcom will this week push for an antitrust investigation into Amazon (AMZN.O) and Microsoft’s (MSFT.O) dominance of the UK’s cloud computing market, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

The recommendation, first issued by Ofcom in April, will remain in the body’s final report on the matter, set to be published on Thursday, one of the sources said.

Ofcom warned the current state of Britain’s cloud computing market made it difficult for some existing customers to bargain for a good deal with their provider.

Technical restrictions and discounts encouraging customers to keep using a single provider for all their needs, even when better alternatives were available, could be considered anti-competitive, the body said in a report earlier this year.

“It would be a particularly unfortunate outcome if UK businesses and public sector customers faced less vibrant and competitive cloud solutions on a global stage than those available to their rivals in the EU, the U.S. and China," it said.

A spokesperson for Ofcom said: “We will be announcing our decision whether or not to refer the market to the CMA by the statutory deadline, which is Thursday 5 October.”

The original article contains 331 words, the summary contains 198 words. Saved 40%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

The vendor technical lock in side is difficult - there is lock in because they have developed a service to differentiate themselves from the competition…

You can reduce the lock in by reducing their feature set to a reduced level - most multi clout implementations basically use containers to do everything I think?