EU Watchdogs Urge Deeper Probe Into Google’s $32B Wiz Acquisition

A coalition of civil society organizations has sounded the alarm over Google’s proposed $32 billion acquisition of cloud security firm Wiz, cautioning that the deal could significantly weaken competition in the cloud and cybersecurity markets. The groups have formally urged the European Commission to initiate a detailed Phase II antitrust investigation, rather than granting clearance during its initial review, with a decision expected by February 10.

In their submission, organizations including the Balanced Economy Project, Open Markets Institute, Rebalance Now, SOMO, and Article 19 stress that Wiz occupies a uniquely sensitive position in the cloud ecosystem. As a leading multi-cloud security platform, Wiz operates across major environments such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle. By bringing Wiz under its control, Google—a dominant hyperscale cloud provider—would effectively gain influence over a neutral security layer that enterprises rely on to manage risk across competing clouds.

The coalition warns that this integration could enable subtle yet far-reaching foreclosure tactics. Rather than openly restricting access, Google could prioritize faster innovation, deeper integration, and better support for GCP deployments while allowing feature parity, performance, or responsiveness for rival clouds to lag. Over time, bundling Wiz with Google Cloud services or Gemini AI offerings could further lock customers into Google’s ecosystem and marginalize independent cybersecurity vendors.

Another key concern is information asymmetry. Wiz has broad visibility into security telemetry and usage patterns across multiple cloud platforms. The groups argue that Google could leverage this cross-cloud intelligence to shape its product strategy, identify competitors’ weaknesses, and craft targeted migration narratives—advantages that other cloud providers would be unable to match.

Beyond competition, the submission raises systemic and sovereignty risks for Europe. Cloud security tools are deeply embedded in compliance, monitoring, and incident-response workflows, making switching costly and disruptive. Further concentration among U.S.-based hyperscalers, the groups argue, could increase exposure to outages and cyber incidents while reducing strategic autonomy for European enterprises and public institutions.

Given these long-term structural implications, the coalition contends that the transaction cannot be safely resolved through a fast-track review. Instead, they call for broad market consultation and deeper scrutiny to fully assess the deal’s impact on competition, innovation, resilience, and digital sovereignty in Europe.