Google against Microsoft at the Commission: Its practices violate competition rules

Google has taken Microsoft to the European Commission. It accuses it of practices that violate competition rules as Microsoft pushes customers to use its “cloud” platform at the expense of its competitors, Google said.

“We believe that taking this action before the regulator is the only way to end the lock-in practiced by Microsoft to allow customers to have a choice and create a fair playing field for competitors,” Amit Zaveri, general manager and vice president of Google Cloud Platform, said during a press conference.

Microsoft’s software licensing terms prevent European organizations from moving their work from Azure (Microsoft’s cloud platform) to competing clouds,” Google explained in a statement.

Specifically, companies that have Microsoft’s Windows Server operating software and wish to run it on a different ” cloud ” platform from Microsoft’s, such as Google Cloud or AWS, Amazon’s ” cloud “, face exorbitant costs, which can amount to a 400% price hike and “a restriction on security updates”, according to Google.

The European Commission, the European Union’s competition rules watchdog that has repeatedly sanctioned Microsoft for practices that violate competition rules, also opened an investigation in July 2023 into the Redmond Group, which is suspected of abusing its dominant position in software to favor the Teams video conferencing application at the expense of other competitors.

This process has forced the company founded by Bill Gates to announce that Teams will be split off from Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook, first in Europe and then in the rest of the world.

Google is also frequently in the crosshairs of Brussels over issues of competition rule violations.

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