After being targeted by EU regulators over its own practices, Google has now filed a complaint with the European Commission about Microsoft abusing its market dominance in the cloud sector.
Google alleges that Microsoft’s licensing terms for Azure cloud services restricts customers from accessing rival platforms, including Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services.
It contends that Microsoft uses unfair licensing terms to “lock in” clients and exert control over the cloud market.
Google maintains that Microsoft through its dominant Windows Server and Microsoft Office products, can make it difficult for its huge number of clients to use anything but its Azure cloud infrastructure offering.
It noted that Microsoft’s conduct amounts to an abuse of dominance under EU law, according to a summary of the complaint.
In a move designed to rattle the EU’s antritrust watchdog, Google added that Microsoft’s dominance in the cloud sector risks exposing EU citizens to security risks and IT failures.
It highlighted the massive CrowdStrike outage in July that resulted in a crippling outage of critical systems around the world that resulted in losses running into the hundreds of millions for businesses globally.
Google’s latest action comes as it unsuccessfully tried earlier this year to derail a deal struck between Microsoft and smaller European cloud firms. That deal saw the smaller cloud firms drop their complaint against Microsoft over the US tech giant’s software licensing processes.
Microsoft contends that Google’s latest action will fizzle out, just as the action from the smaller cloud firms in the EU. “Microsoft settled amicably similar concerns raised by European cloud providers, even after Google hoped they would keep litigating,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “Having failed to persuade European companies, we expect Google similarly will fail to persuade the European Commission.”
Google Cloud recorded a profit of $1.17 billion (A$1.71 billion) in the second quarter. The company still trails Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud computing market, but is gradually gaining ground.
The EU’s powerful Digital Markets Act is clamping down on anti-competitive and monopolistic practices of Big Tech companies operating in the bloc.
In June, for the first time in 15 years, the EU regulator brought charges against Microsoft for antitrust violations within Europe. The European Commission has accused Microsoft of illegally bundling its Teams chat app with its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 subscriptions.
If Microsoft, or any other company, is found guilty of antitrust violations, they could potentially face fines of up to 10 per cent of their annual worldwide turnover.
