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A watched question with a line drawn in advance

The threshold was written before the observation existed. That is what stops a state from being argued into place after the fact.

Four states, no probabilities

Observed, emerging, contested, not observed. These are qualitative readings against the threshold. No number is invented here, because an invented number would be the most quotable and least true thing on the page.

It stays alive between revisions

The update condition names what would move the state. A signpost that has stayed quiet is information too, and is published rather than hidden.

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SCN-D21-002 · Observed 2025-07-31

observed

Winner Takes Infrastructure

Qualitative signpost review · no probability assigned

Bounded observation

The UK Competition and Markets Authority's final cloud-services market investigation found adverse effects on competition and recommended prioritising strategic-market-status investigations of the two largest providers, Microsoft and AWS. This is an official competition finding consistent with durable infrastructure concentration, while the proceeding does not establish that open models or portable evaluation layers cannot mitigate application-level lock-in.

Trigger threshold

Observed threshold is a final competition-authority finding that named hyperscale providers hold positions warranting targeted market-power investigation, beyond market-share anecdotes.

Counter-indicator

The CMA subsequently recorded provider steps on interoperability and egress fees, and a competition finding is not proof that every customer or downstream AI workload is locked in.

Update criterion

Review after any strategic-market-status decisions and measure realised switching, multi-cloud portability and egress costs; downgrade if comparable outcomes become routinely portable across providers.

Primary routes

  1. https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/cloud-services-market-investigation