On Wednesday, Google filed a complaint with the European Commission against Microsoft, in which the company claims that the Redmond-based giant had a competitive impact on the market with some license agreements for its cloud services.
The complaint is practically one-for-one based on the previous complaint filed against the company by the professional association of European cloud infrastructure providers, CISPE (which includes Amazon AWS, Aruba and OVHcloud, but not Google). in 2022. In it, the organization primarily complained that Microsoft made it difficult for its customers to switch providers and locked them too much into the Azure ecosystem, a practice that had a distorting effect on competition.
Microsoft and CISPE eventually reached an agreement through negotiations, part of which included commitments from Microsoft to make further changes to its cloud licensing practices, and in exchange for the trade organization withdrawing its complaint.
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In July of this year, Google made one last attempt to change CISPE’s position by making a counteroffer of 470 million euros, which included, among other things, a five-year software license, in addition to cash and long-term partnership offers, the company tried to convince the parties that pursue an EU antitrust complaint against Microsoft.
In the end, CISPE chose Microsoft, which essentially rendered the original antitrust proceedings moot, but Google did not leave it at that and filed a complaint with the Commission in its own right.
The central element of this complaint is the licensing practice called “cloud tax”, according to which, if a company does not run Microsoft Office products in Microsoft’s cloud, it must pay hefty license costs to the Redmond company – the annual rate of which, applied to the entire EU, is a 2023- according to a survey, it reaches one billion euros.
Source: www.hwsw.hu
