Cloud inquiry chair quits UK competition watchdog over glacial pace of reform
Kip Meeks walked a year early with the overseer of tech markets yet to take action against AWS and Microsoft
The chair of the competition markets authority's cloud inquiry has quit, citing the slow pace of implementing recommendations outlined in a report it published in 2025 to boost market dynamics in Britain's cloud computing market.
Kip Meeks, who worked as Inquiry Chair at the Competition and Markets Authority since 2018, provisionally found that the cloud market was working well… for AWS and Microsoft. For customers, interoperability challenges and Microsoft licensing policies were a sticking point.
With the two US hyperscalers accounting for up to 90 percent of the country's cloud services market, the CMA inquiry in July advised designating the pair with strategic market status for cloud computing, meaning they'd face stricter rules as tech firms with "substantial and entrenched market power" and significant influence over specific digital activities. Yet a year after that finding, and almost two-and-a-half years after the investigation first began, the industry is still waiting for the regulator to take action.
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Meeks left in late January - a year before his term comes to an end. He told The Morning Intelligence: "I shared concerns at the time that the CMA was taking a long time to pick up the recommendations of our report."
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"I'm still concerned that the pace is going slowly," he added.
The Register has contacted Meeks for further comment but we have yet to hear from him at the time of publication. A spokesperson at the CMA told us:
"Kip has concluded his current caseload and left the CMA a few months before the end of an eight-year term. Any appointments to the CMA panel and/or board are a matter for government so you're best place [sic] reaching out to the Department of Business and Trade."
For clarity, we also asked the CMA if a replacement for Meeks was found; why it had taken months to take action; and if the CMA is voting on proposals this month. It did not respond on these points.
The watchdog itself uses AWS hosting services, and upped spending level in 2024. It decided early on in the cloud services investigation to drop one of the key lines of inquiry: whether committed discounts spending - which the CMA perhaps benefits from - was a cause for concern.
Meeks' resignation comes weeks after the CMA named Doug Gurr, a former Amazon executive whose tenure at the corporation lasted 16 years, was made permanent Chairman at the agency. We also asked if Gurr's appointment was related to Meeks' decision to stand down.
In addition to calling it out for its snail-like progress, Meeks reportedly said 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 execs doing so. Again, we asked the CMA to comment.
Despite the CMA's tough talking, UK customers are still waiting for the toothless tiger to take action beyond its pro-growth agenda handed down by Prime Minister Keir Starmer. ®