Getting ahead of antitrust I see. Big tech has gotten so big that we will now see this peace meal stuff being done to appease regulators to stave off any major action.
Google Cloud has ~10% market share; I don't think this is an antitrust avoidance play. More likely, it's removing a concern companies might have with bringing workloads onto a relatively smaller player. Especially one that has a history of discontinuing products.
The issue isn't as much market share as it is how sticky picking a cloud platform is. At that point the market share doesn't really matter, especially if your name is Google.
don't think so. Google is the distant 3rd in the Cloud, so hardly a subject to antitrust. It is more likely that failing hard on their goals for the Cloud set to that division about 3 years ago (and it was rumored that either they achieve the goals or it is "or else" for the Cloud division) they are starting the blame game whining about licensing/unfair competition/etc. (whereis they should blame only themselves as they would never bend over to the enterprise customer like say AWS would do who for example developed MS SQL (Transact SQL) interface to their own db - that is how you deal with the competition and software lock-in instead of whining (reminds that phrase from Babel - "that is why Benja is the king, while we are sitting on the cemetery fence"). In this case for example I remember how AWS was hunting down laid off Sybase (where T-SQL comes from) engineers whereis being an experienced enterprise software developer is viewed by Google is more like a disadvantage and results in meager offer (several my acquaintances had similar experience), so GCP losing enterprise game doesn't look that surprising to me. And now that enterprise customers are starting to add huge AI related workloads the GCP is hardly ever mentioned)