Microsoft Faces Antitrust Complaint in Europe

A French cloud computing company has filed an antitrust allegation against Microsoft Corp in Europe. MSFT adds to recent criticisms of corporate competitive practices that have largely avoided the scrutiny of recent regulations targeting competing tech giants.

OVHcloud said it has filed a complaint with the European Commission, the highest competition authority in the European Union. The complaint mentions the ways in which Microsoft licenses its products, such as its office productivity suite, that may make it more expensive to use cloud services that compete with Microsoft's Azure cloud.

OHVcloud has said that the complaint was filed jointly with other companies and refused to name the other companies.

Two other recent complaints in Europe also claimed that Microsoft bundled cloud products in an anti-competitive way. In 2020, San Francisco-based messaging app Slack Technologies Inc. complained to the EU that Microsoft bundled its rival work collaboration product Teams with popular Office software. Last year, German cloud storage company Nextcloud complained to the EU about Microsoft bundling OneDrive storage products with the Windows operating system.

New complaints against Microsoft occur at a critical time for Microsoft. The company, which acquired game developer Activision Blizzard Inc. for $ 75 billion, is seeking approval, one of the biggest deals to date, which is also being considered by regulators.

The US Federal Trade Commission will consider whether Activision's transactions will significantly reduce competition in the gaming market. As the European cloud market grows, much of that growth extends to the top three US cloud providers: Microsoft, Amazon, and Google Cloud. According to the Synergy Research Group, these three occupy 69% of the European cloud market today. 

John Dinsdale, the chief analyst at Synergy, said it is difficult for European cloud companies to keep up with the growing scale and speed of US cloud companies adding that all the three companies are pouring billions into their cloud operations every quarter.