GOOG - US and UK Regulators Are Going After Amazon And Microsoft | Benzinga
On September 26th, the Federal Trade Commission went into action to stop the monopoly power of Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN) by filing a long-awaited antitrust suit. The case was filed in conjunction with seventeen states, accusing the e-commerce titan of using its online retail dominance to suppress competition. On Thursday, UK’s media regulator asked the country's antitrust authority to investigate both Amazon and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) regarding their dominance of the UK cloud market.
The FTC Finally Went After Amazon
The case FTC made has several aspects. FTC wants Amazon to make structural changes to its business. Secondly, FTC aims to free sellers from the pressure Amazon places on them for using its own fulfillment service when listing their products under Amazon Prime. The governments finds that with this move, Amazon is unfairly advantaging its own warehousing and shipping services because sellers cannot choose a different option if they want full access to Amazon’s enormous base of potential consumers. The FTC also argues that this prevents other delivery-fulfillment-service companies from growing and developing their customer base.
The Cloud Battle
According to Ofcom, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft together held 70-80% share of Britain's public cloud infrastructure services market last year, with their closest competitor being Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOG) Google with a 5 to 10% share. With AWS cloud solutions, Amazon is primarily targeting startups, while Microsoft has its eyes set on big enterprises. Ofcom estimates that Amazon, Microsoft and Google generate roughly 81% of revenues in the U.K.’s cloud infrastructure services ...