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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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?

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

> 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.

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

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)