The UK spent three years investigating cloud competition, recommended designating AWS and Microsoft as strategic-market-status suppliers, and then accepted voluntary commitments instead. A field guide to telling real remedies from theater.
AT&T told a court it was facing a 1,050% price increase. CISPE members reported hikes up to 1,500%. Broadcom's VMware playbook wasn't a scandal; it was a valuation of switching costs, executed precisely, and it predicts the next consolidation wave.
Hyperscaler capital is stampeding toward AI factories, and the ordinary developer workload, a container, a database, a preview environment, is nobody's priority. That neglect is the opening every developer cloud is built on.
Three Mile Island is being restarted for a single customer. Hyperscalers are buying reactors because the constraint on cloud capacity stopped being racks or chips and became megawatts, and that breaks a decade of assumptions about regions.
CoreWeave went from crypto-mining afterthought to a public company with a $99 billion backlog by selling exactly one thing well. The specific companies may wobble. The procurement habit they taught buyers won't.
On the morning of November 18, 2025, EU regulators published their list of critical cloud providers. That afternoon, Cloudflare fell over and demonstrated it. The autumn outage cluster wasn't three stories. It was one.
Gartner said 80% of large engineering orgs would have platform teams by 2026. They do. And nearly all of them are assembling the same portal from the same parts, with no customers who can say no.
Egress fees survived for over a decade and died within nine weeks of EU regulation taking hold. Prices that behave like that aren't cost recovery. Cloud pricing complexity is a business model, and it's working.