The European Commission made it official this week: it intends to designate Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as “gatekeepers” under the Digital Markets Act. Don’t be fooled by the technocratic language. This is protectionism with a Brussels accent.

The DMA was sold to the world as a tool to rein in dominant platforms where real monopoly power exists, think dominant search engines, app stores, and social networks that billions of people have no practical alternative to. Cloud computing is none of those things. The EU knows it. That’s why no American cloud service provider meets the DMA’s own quantitative thresholds for gatekeeper designation. The Commission is moving forward anyway.

That’s not enforcement. That’s improvisation in service of an agenda.

The EU’s “tech sovereignty” project has been transparent in its goals for years: tilt the regulatory playing field against American technology companies and toward European alternatives. The DMA cloud investigation is the latest chapter. AWS has committed tens of billions of euros to data centers across France, Germany, Spain, and beyond. Microsoft Azure has made similarly massive European investments. These companies are not extracting value from Europe, they are building it. Gatekeeper designation is the reward they get for it.

The legal rationale here is thin to the point of embarrassment. Cloud services don’t intermediate between businesses and consumers the way the DMA envisions. There’s no platform dynamic. There’s no gateway. Applying a framework designed for two-sided platforms to enterprise cloud infrastructure is a category error, and European regulators are sophisticated enough to know that.

What makes this even harder to justify: Europe already regulates cloud. The EU Data Act regulates interoperability, portability, and customer switching mechanisms, exactly the issues the Commission claims to be investigating. The cloud sector is already highly competitive, with more than 70 percent of European customers using multiple providers and prices continuing to fall.

The costs here are real. Layering duplicative DMA obligations on top of the Data Act framework creates compliance burdens that hit American companies hardest. That’s not incidental, it’s the point. Regulatory unpredictability chills investment. Infrastructure dollars that would have flowed to European data centers will go elsewhere, and the jobs, skills, and capacity go with them. European businesses relying on cutting-edge cloud and AI capabilities will be the collateral damage.

US leaders need to keep fighting back against these draconian actions by the EU. This is not a routine regulatory disagreement. It is a pattern of discriminatory action against American companies that are playing by the rules, investing in Europe, and serving European customers well. If Brussels faces no consequences for stretching its own law to punish American success, it will keep doing it.