The American giant Google This Wednesday, he filed a complaint with the European Commission against his great rival. Microsoft in which it accuses it of monopolistic abuses in cloud services. Specifically, Google claims that Microsoft takes advantage of its dominant position in Windows products to impose its cloud computing platform on its customers Azureto the detriment of other competing suppliers.
“We received the complaintwhich we will assess according to our standard procedures,” explained a spokesperson for the Community Executive. Brussels already has an investigation open against Microsoft for abuse of a dominant position to impose its remote communication and collaboration tool Teams.
“THE Microsoft’s Restrictive Licensing Policies forced some Windows Server customers to use Azure or face 400 percent price increases if they switched to competitors’ cloud services,” Google claims in its complaint.
[Bruselas acusa a Microsoft de abusar de su posición dominante para imponer su programa ‘Teams’]
“This has caused considerable harm to European businesses and governments: stifling competition, generating a cost of one billion euros per year and increases the risk that organizations will face problems Microsoft’s security culture,” Google says.
The search engine giant says the most significant restriction came in 2019, when Microsoft incorporated new conditions into its licenses, imposing financial penalties on companies that decided to use the software of Windows Server on the closest Azure competitors, such as Google Cloud or AWS.
Customers who want to move their workloads to These competitors have to pay five times more. And for those who choose to continue running Windows Server on other clouds (despite the increased costs), Microsoft has introduced additional hurdles, such as limited security patches and other interoperability barriers, according to Google’s complaint.
The complaint does not automatically guarantee that the European Commission will open an investigation into the matter, which would take several years to resolve in any case. At the end of the procedure, Brussels could impose a multi-million dollar fine on Microsoft and force it to remove the alleged restrictions on competition.
