War of the giants. Google has reported Microsoft to the European Commission for anti-competitive practices in cloud licensing. The Silicon Valley company believes that the multinational founded by Bill Gates restricts the ability of European companies to transfer workloads to competing platforms, forcing Windows Server customers to use Azure or imposing a price increase of up to 400%.
“Microsoft has trapped customers in Teams, even when they preferred other providers. Now, the company is doing exactly the same by pushing businesses to Azure, its cloud platform,” Google said in a statement. “Microsoft is the only cloud service provider using these tactics that have significant harm to European businesses and governments,” the press release added, estimating the cost to Europeans affected at 1 billion euros per year, in addition to the damage to other firms. “It has created a greater risk for organizations that are exposed to Microsoft’s inadequate security culture,” it added.
Google’s account is that Microsoft limited its customers’ use of platforms outside of Azure when cloud competition began to intensify: “The most significant restriction came in 2019, when Microsoft added new licensing terms imposing extreme financial penalties on companies that chose to use Windows Server software on Azure’s closest competitors, such as Google Cloud or AWS.”
“Microsoft’s own statements indicate that customers who want to move their workloads to these competitors have to pay five times as much. And for those who choose to continue running Windows Server in other clouds (despite the increased cost), Microsoft has introduced additional hurdles, such as limited security patches and other interoperability barriers,” the statement added.
The European Commission has received the complaint and will begin its analysis based on standard procedures. The matter will be handled by the Competition portfolio, which will be taken over by Teresa Ribera in a few months.
This is not the first complaint against Microsoft for alleged abuse of its position in the cloud. The Spanish Association of Startups filed a similar complaint with the National Commission of Markets and Competition (CNMC) on the grounds that the American multinational commits “restrictive practices observed in the cloud services market” that would be “imposing artificial barriers that limit the ability of startups to compete fairly and competitively.”
The complaint of the Spanish start-ups is similar to the one that the technology giant is now making to the European Commission. The association, which represents some 700 start-ups, points to the difficulties that Microsoft generates in data portability to services that it does not control, or “the restrictive contractual conditions of competition in software licenses, which would be making it difficult or preventing the free choice of providers of these services, reducing the capacity of choice and the flexibility that start-ups need to be resilient, innovate and grow.”
Source: www.eldiario.es
