5 ms·

EU to soon classify AWS and Azure as gatekeepers under DSA

66 points by snowpid 4mo ago

enz 4mo ago
> 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, ...)?
- kalleboo 4mo ago
  The issue originated in us-east-1 but had a huge blast radius beyond that - e.g. it took SES down.
- ninjalanternshk 4mo ago
  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.
- Sayrus 4mo ago
  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.
  - Natfan 4mo ago
    insane that aws doesn't have zonal redundancy for their own systems
    - jurgenburgen 4mo ago
      Yeah, they should move their stuff to the cloud.
itopaloglu83 4mo ago
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?
- baka367 4mo ago
  In the age of staple shenanigans from the US with tariffs and AI prohibition, I find this to be an adequate response.
- jraph 4mo ago
  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?
  - benoau 4mo ago
    > 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.
  - itopaloglu83 4mo ago
    > 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.
dbvn 4mo ago
How could a cloud provider *not* qualify as a gatekeeper under these guidelines?
- benoau 4mo ago
  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%3A2022%3A265%3ATOC&uri=uriserv%3AOJ.L_.2022.265.01.0001.01.ENG 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)
CodesInChaos 4mo ago
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.
- SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
  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.
josephh 4mo ago
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.
- d0liver 4mo ago
  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.
pabs3 4mo ago
They should classify the ICANN and the RIRs as gatekeepers too, they are the biggest ones.

66 points by snowpid 4mo ago

enz 4mo ago

> 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, ...)?

kalleboo 4mo ago
The issue originated in us-east-1 but had a huge blast radius beyond that - e.g. it took SES down.
ninjalanternshk 4mo ago
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.
Sayrus 4mo ago
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.
- Natfan 4mo ago
  insane that aws doesn't have zonal redundancy for their own systems
  - jurgenburgen 4mo ago
    Yeah, they should move their stuff to the cloud.

itopaloglu83 4mo ago

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?

baka367 4mo ago
In the age of staple shenanigans from the US with tariffs and AI prohibition, I find this to be an adequate response.
jraph 4mo ago
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?
- benoau 4mo ago
  > 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.
- itopaloglu83 4mo ago
  > 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.

dbvn 4mo ago

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

benoau 4mo ago
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%3A2022%3A265%3ATOC&uri=uriserv%3AOJ.L_.2022.265.01.0001.01.ENG 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)

CodesInChaos 4mo ago

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.

SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
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.

josephh 4mo ago

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.

d0liver 4mo ago
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.

pabs3 4mo ago

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