Microsoft's cloud computing business is subject to antitrust complaints

2022-11-09

On the morning of November 9, Beijing time, it was reported that Microsoft's cloud computing business was facing new antitrust complaints when the acquisition of Activision Blizzard was facing an EU antitrust review. On Wednesday local time, the trade group CISPE (its members include Amazon) filed a complaint with the EU antitrust regulator. CISPE said that the new contract terms implemented by Microsoft on October 1 and other practices of the company are causing irreparable damage to the European cloud computing ecosystem. Amazon is the market leader in cloud computing, followed by Microsoft and Google under Alphabet. Francisco Mingorance, Secretary General of CISPE, said in a statement: "When European customers seek to move to the cloud, Microsoft used its dominant position in productivity software to limit customers' choices and increase customers' costs, thus affecting the digital economy in Europe." CISPE said in its complaint to the European Commission that the company used its dominant position in productivity software, Introduce European customers to their own Azure cloud computing infrastructure, thus causing European competitors to be at a disadvantage. The organization said Microsoft's anti competitive behaviors include discriminatory bundling and tying of its products, favorable pricing for itself, and targeting customers at the technical and competitive levels. Microsoft has been fined more than 1.6 billion euros by the European Commission for various monopolistic acts in the past decade. The company said before that it would provide its software to all customers, including competitors' cloud suppliers. Cloud service providers in Germany, Italy, Denmark and France (two of which are members of CISPE) have also filed similar complaints with the Commission in the past few years. Microsoft subsequently amended the license agreement and made other changes to make it easier for cloud service providers to compete with them from October 1, in order to avoid anti-monopoly penalties in the EU. However, its competitors Amazon, Alphabet's Google and Microsoft's own cloud services are excluded from these changes. CISPE said that the EU competition supervision authority should solve this problem by adopting the principle of fair software licensing formulated by the agency last year to Microsoft. The agency believes that the EU can establish an independent European Observatory to audit the license terms of the dominant software companies. CISPE also said that the European Commission could add another provision in the newly adopted rules for technology enterprises, namely the Digital Markets Act, to prohibit cloud computing leading enterprises from favoring their own software programs. (Liu Xinshe)

Edit:Lijialang    Responsible editor:MuMu

Source:ithome.com

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