Google Files an Antitrust Complaint against Microsoft With the European Commission

• Google has accused Microsoft of using unfair contract terms to lock in its customers and prevent them from switching to other providers.
• Google is worried that this will not only hurt competition in the cloud computing industry but also make businesses more prone to security issues.
• In response, Microsoft said that this issue has already been discussed with the CISPE and a settlement has been reached. it's hoping that the EU Commission will dismiss Google's complaint.

On Wednesday, Google filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission accusing the latter of weaponizing its licensing contracts to stifle competition in the cloud computing industry. We did see a summary of the complaint but the rest of the documents may not come out until a few weeks.

Basically, Microsoft is allegedly including unfair terms in its contracts that are locking in its customers, making it harder for them to use other services than what Microsoft's Azure Cloud Platform offers.

These grievances have been shared by the Google Cloud Platform for more than a year now. It was first raised by Amit Zavery, Vice President and head of GCP, in 2023 when he talked about the software tax".

• Zavery said that Microsoft was charging its customers to run its products on Google Cloud Platform.
• A 2023 study by CISPE (Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe) also revealed that businesses across Europe have been forced to pay up to 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) a year in licensing penalties to Microsoft, due to the strict contract clauses that make it almost impossible to switch providers.
• It added that Microsoft dominates the operating system industry, with more than 70% of the businesses running their systems on Windows. So now Google is worried that Microsoft might try to dominate the cloud computing industry in a similar fashion.

Such dominance will not only hurt competition but as per Google, might also make businesses more vulnerable to security issues.

However, we find it pretty ironic that Google, of all companies, has a problem antitrust issues. After all, Google has had its fair share of antitrust accusations in the past.

• For example, only this month, the Competition and Markets Authority of Britain accused Google of hindering competition in the ad tech industry.
• In August, Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly in the search engine market - it has been paying companies like Apple, Mozilla, and Samsung to make the Google search engine default on their devices.

And as Cory Doctorow discussed in his speech at DEFCON, companies like Google have been following the monopolist mindset for decades. In fact, as per Cory, they have enshittified their products by building a monopoly economy with the help of regulators.

What Does Microsoft Have to Say About This?

In July this year, the CISPE raised similar concerns about Microsoft's impact on the competition of the cloud industry in Europe. They were ultimately able to reach a settlement in which Microsoft agreed to make changes to its contract clauses.

The company will be working with the members to release an advanced version of Azure Stack HCI to offer the same benefits to its customers that they get from using its Azure product currently.

So addressing Google's complaint, the firm said that it hopes the European Commission will take the settlement into consideration and dismiss the complaint.

Apparently, Google (not a part of the CISPE) had tried to take a legal route while protesting along with the CISPE members but failed. So it has now decided to go ahead and file an official complaint by itself.

Having failed to persuade European companies, we expect Google similarly will fail to persuade the European Commission.' - Microsoft

In addition to that, the firm also said that it doesn't believe its practices have harmed competition in the industry in any way. In fact, everything is functioning quite well.

Still, Google isn't convinced. It said that it doesn't agree with the settlement terms and believes that a lot more has to be done to keep the cloud computing industry fair and accessible to all.

Other tech giants such as Amazon Web Services (part of the CISPE) and AliCloud (part of Alibaba) have also decided not to be a part of the settlement. However, both these companies have refused to comment on the issue.

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