Google has filed a complaint with the European Commission against Microsoft, which it accuses of anti-competitive practices by pushing its customers to use its cloud platform (remote computing) to the detriment of its competitors, the American giant announced on Wednesday, September 25.
“We believe this action with the regulator is the only way to end Microsoft’s lock-in, provide customers with choice, and create a level playing field for competitors,” Amit Zavery, general manager and vice president of Google Cloud Platform, said at a press conference. “Microsoft’s software licensing terms prevent European organizations from moving their current workloads from Azure (Microsoft’s cloud platform) to competing clouds,” Google said in a statement.
In detail, companies that have Microsoft’s Windows Server operating software and want to run it on a “cloud” platform other than Microsoft’s, such as Google Cloud or AWS, Amazon’s “cloud”, must face exorbitant costs, which can reach a price increase of 400%, and “a limitation of security patches”, according to Google, which formally filed its complaint on Tuesday evening. According to the American giant, Microsoft began to put in place increasingly strict restrictions on the use of its software from 2019, putting in place numerous “interoperability barriers”.
An investigation opened in July 2023
The European Commission, responsible for ensuring competition in the EU, which has already sanctioned Microsoft on several occasions for anti-competitive practices, also opened an investigation in July 2023 into the Redmond group, suspected of having abused its dominant position in software to promote the growth of Teams, its videoconferencing application, to the detriment of its competitors. This procedure forced the company founded by Bill Gates to announce the separation of Teams from its Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook office software, first in Europe and then worldwide.
Google itself is regularly on Brussels’ radar in terms of competition. In September, the European Court of Justice validated a fine of 2.4 billion euros imposed in 2017 on the Mountain View group for abuse of a dominant position on the online search market.