Microsoft Close to Settling EC Antitrust Cloud Complaints

upstart writes:

Transparency? Redmond's heard of it:

Microsoft is close to resolving antitrust complaints lodged against it with the European Commission by local suppliers OVHcloud, Aruba S.p.A and Danish Cloud Community (DCC) over alleged commercial abuses.

The details of the said settlement remain under wraps and likely won't be published in detail, which is frustrating others' efforts to take the US software and cloud giant to task over alleged controlling market behavior.

OVHcloud, Aruba and DCC fired a joint complaint against Microsoft in May, with OVH itself confirming they were pressing the authorities for a "level playing field among cloud providers," saying Microsoft "undermines fair competition."

The complaint was focused on the higher costs of buying and running Microsoft software in clouds other than Azure, and technical adjustments needed to run some programs on competitors' clouds.

Fast-forward to this week and chatty sources close to the situation indicate Microsoft has agreed to settle the case and will propose binding commitments imminently, according to Bloomberg.

[...] Representing 24 cloud providers, the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) group itself filed a formal competition complaint against Microsoft in November, saying the vendor uses: "unjustified and discriminatory bundling, tying, self-preferencing pricing and technical and economic lock-in" to "restrict choice".

It claimed the actions of Microsoft were in violation of Article 102 TFEU, and provide grounds for the EC to launch a formal investigation.

Francisco Mingorance, Secretary General at CISPE, which counts OVH, Aruba and many others as members, told us today the decision by the trio to settle with Microsoft was "disappointing on many levels."

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