From London: as Australians woke this morning, one of Britain's most consequential regulatory dramas was deepening quietly in Westminster. The chair of the Competition and Markets Authority's cloud services inquiry, Kip Meeks, has walked out of the job a full year before his term was due to end, citing the regulator's failure to act on its own findings. The resignation, reported by The Register, is an uncomfortable signal that the UK's competition enforcement machinery may be grinding to a halt precisely when it matters most.
The stakes here are not trivial. AWS and Microsoft together account for up to 90 per cent of the UK's cloud services market, and the CMA inquiry in July 2025 recommended designating both with strategic market status for cloud computing, meaning they would face stricter rules as firms with "substantial and entrenched market power." UK customers spent £9 billion on cloud services in 2023, a figure growing by more than 30 per cent each year. This is not an esoteric regulatory skirmish; it touches the digital infrastructure on which British businesses, hospitals, and government agencies depend.
Meeks, who served as inquiry chair at the CMA since 2018, provisionally found that the cloud market was working well for AWS and Microsoft. For customers, interoperability challenges and Microsoft's licensing policies were the central sticking points. Yet despite those findings being handed down more than a year ago, and almost two and a half years after the investigation first began, the industry is still waiting for the regulator to take meaningful action.
Meeks left in late January, a year before his term was set to conclude. He told The Morning Intelligence that he had raised concerns about the CMA's pace at the time of his departure. "I shared concerns at the time that the CMA was taking a long time to pick up the recommendations of our report," he said, adding: "I'm still concerned that the pace is going slowly." The CMA, for its part, offered a carefully worded response: a spokesperson said Meeks "concluded his current caseload and left the CMA a few months before the end of an eight-year term." When The Register asked whether a replacement had been found and why action had taken so long, it received no response on those points.
The conflict-of-interest questions surrounding the CMA are harder to dismiss than a spokesperson's non-answer. Meeks' resignation came weeks after the CMA named Doug Gurr, a former Amazon executive whose tenure at the company spanned 16 years, as permanent chairman of the agency. Gurr had been serving as interim chair since January 2025 and was then selected to complete a full five-year term following an open competition for the role. The Business and Trade Committee's chair, Labour MP Liam Byrne, felt Gurr's past as a Big Tech executive could present a "conflict of interest" at the authority, which is supposed to promote competitive markets and protect consumers. He noted that in the year Gurr had already been the CMA's interim head, the watchdog had not blocked any mergers, a first since 2017.
The watchdog itself uses AWS hosting services and increased its spending with the company in 2024. It also decided early in the cloud services investigation to drop a key line of inquiry: whether committed-discount spending arrangements, from which the CMA itself may benefit, were a cause for concern. These facts do not prove bad faith, but they do create a pattern that any competent regulator would recognise as problematic for public confidence.
Those who support the government's direction would argue the criticism is overblown. Business Secretary Peter Kyle has been explicit that he wants the CMA to prioritise growth over reflexive intervention. Kyle said Gurr, as interim chair, had already heeded Prime Minister Keir Starmer's advice to be more commercially minded, describing the CMA under his leadership as "playing a key role in delivering the government's pro-growth agenda." Competition lawyers have noted that the post-Gurr CMA has become faster and more predictable on mergers, which is a legitimate objective. One RPC competition lawyer argued Gurr's review had "sharpened" the CMA's focus on proportionality and economic growth, with his tech background a bonus given the CMA's expanding digital remit.
The tech companies themselves push back on the premise of the inquiry. AWS has said the proposed intervention under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 is "not warranted", arguing the IT services industry is highly competitive and that cloud computing has lowered costs for UK businesses through on-demand and pay-as-you-go pricing. Microsoft has made similar arguments, insisting the market is dynamic and investing heavily in new infrastructure. These are not frivolous positions; cloud pricing has fallen substantially over the past decade and the sector does attract enormous capital.
Beyond the pace of action, Meeks reportedly warned that the independence of the CMA is at risk as it potentially moves from a panel of independent members voting on merger investigations to a committee that includes CMA executives doing so. The government's proposed measures are due to increase the CMA board's involvement and cut independent panels' role in deciding whether deals proceed. Whether this represents sensible modernisation or a subtle erosion of institutional checks is a question that deserves a more substantive public debate than it has so far received.
For Canberra, the implications are worth watching. Australia's own Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is engaged in its own assessment of digital platform market power, and the choices made in London about how hard to push against AWS and Microsoft will set international precedent. If a respected regulator like the CMA visibly flinches in the face of Big Tech lobbying and political pressure for growth, other authorities will notice. The question is not whether regulators should support economic growth; of course they should. The question is whether letting a £9 billion market concentrate in two firms' hands, while the watchdog hired to monitor them is led by a former executive of one of those firms, represents sound governance or something more troubling. Reasonable people will draw different conclusions, but they deserve to draw them with all the facts on the table.