AMAZON.COM’s cloud services division is halting fees it has long charged customers that switch to a rival provider – following in the steps of Google, which recently announced it was ending the practice.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) will no longer charge customers who want to extract all of their data from the company’s servers and move them to another service, AWS vice-president Robert Kennedy said on Tuesday (Mar 5).

“Beginning today, customers globally are now entitled to free data transfers out to the Internet if they want to move to another IT provider,” Kennedy said.

The move follows intensifying scrutiny of cloud services by regulators and lawmakers. UK antitrust authorities launched a probe into such penalties, and the fees emerged as a key issue when the US Federal Trade Commission asked for public comments on a variety of cloud concerns.

Amazon has said the fees help cover the costs of networking and other infrastructure.

AWS is the world’s largest provider of rented computing power, followed by Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google. Competition among the three companies heated up recently with the advent of generative artificial intelligence, which mines vast quantities of data to generate text or images. All three are looking to bake the technology into their cloud offerings. BLOOMBERG

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