The EU’s determination to crack down on Big Tech continues as it has now for the first time in 15 years charged Microsoft with 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.

“The European Commission has informed Microsoft of its preliminary view that Microsoft has breached EU antitrust rules by tying its communication and collaboration product Teams to its popular productivity applications included in its suites for businesses Office 365 and Microsoft 365,” said the European Commission.

“We are concerned that Microsoft may be giving its own communication product Teams an undue advantage over competitors, by tying it to its popular productivity suites for businesses,” added Margrethe Vestager, the head of competition policy in Europe. “If confirmed, Microsoft’s conduct would be illegal under our competition rules. Microsoft now has the opportunity to reply to our concern.”

Pre-empting this, in April, Microsoft began selling its Office and Teams products separately globally. It’s worth noting that as of October 1 last year, it was already selling Teams and Office separately in the EU and Switzerland. The decision to do so worldwide was taken in April.

However, those measures don’t seem to have placated EU regulators. “Having unbundled Teams and taken initial interoperability steps, we appreciate the additional clarity provided today and will work to find solutions to address the Commission’s remaining concerns,” Microsoft president Brad Smith told the Financial Times.

The European Commission still contends that Microsoft has given its Teams a “distribution advantage” by not giving customers the choice of whether or not to acquire access to Teams when they subscribe to their SaaS productivity applications.

It has also raised concerns about the interoperability limitations between Teams’ competitors and Microsoft’s offerings, which it says may have prevented Teams’ rivals from competing with it.

If Microsoft is found guilty of antitrust violations, the firm could face a fine of up to 10 per cent of the company’s annual worldwide turnover.

Microsoft’s rivals were expectedly quick to affirm the latest move by the EU. “The Statement of Objections issued today by the European Commission is a win for customer choice and an affirmation that Microsoft’s practices with Teams have harmed competition,” said Sabastian Niles, president and chief legal officer of Salesforce, Slack’s parent company.

The EU opened its investigations into Microsoft’s treatment of Teams bundling last year, following an anti-competitive complaint filed by Slack in July 2020.

Slack’s original complaint alleged that Microsoft had “illegally tied” its Microsoft Teams product to Office and was “force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers.”