(Paris) Google filed a complaint with the European Commission on Wednesday against Microsoft, which it accuses of anti-competitive practices by pushing its customers to use Azure, its cloud platform (remote computing), to the detriment of competitors.
This action “is the only way to end Microsoft’s lock-in, provide customers with choice and create a level playing field for competitors,” Amit Zavery, general manager and vice president of Google Cloud Platform, said at a news conference.
“Microsoft’s software licensing terms prevent European organizations from moving their current workloads from Azure [la plateforme cloud de Microsoft] to competing clouds,” Google said in a statement.
In detail, companies that have Microsoft’s Windows Server operating software and want to run it on a cloud platform other than Microsoft’s, such as Google Cloud or AWS, Amazon’s cloud, must face exorbitant costs, which can reach a price increase of 400%, and “a limitation of security patches”, denounced Google, which filed its complaint on Tuesday evening.
According to the American giant, Microsoft began to implement increasingly strict restrictions on the use of its software from 2019, putting in place numerous “interoperability barriers”.
“Restore competition”
The European Commission, the guardian of competition in the EU, which has already sanctioned Microsoft on several occasions for anti-competitive practices, also opened an investigation in July 2023 into the Redmond group, suspected of having abused its dominant position in software to promote the growth of Teams, its videoconferencing application, to the detriment of competitors.
This procedure forced the company founded by Bill Gates to announce last year the separation of Teams from its office software Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, first in Europe and then worldwide.
But these announcements did not convince Brussels: the Commission considered in June that these changes were “insufficient to respond to its concerns and that it [était] “It is necessary to further modify Microsoft’s behavior to restore competition.”
Microsoft has promised to continue dialogue with Brussels, hoping to avoid a large fine, like the one the company was hit with in 2013, amounting to 561 million euros (843 million Canadian dollars), for imposing its Internet Explorer browser.
Google, which says it hopes the European Commission’s response to its action will be “swift”, is itself regularly on Brussels’ radar in terms of competition.
In September, the European Court of Justice validated a colossal fine of 2.4 billion euros (3.61 billion Canadian dollars) imposed in 2017 on the Mountain View group for abuse of a dominant position in the online search market, even though a few days later the EU court annulled a fine of 1.5 billion euros imposed on Google for abuse of a dominant position in online advertising.
In total, the Californian giant, founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, was fined more than 8 billion euros (12.02 billion Canadian dollars) by Brussels for various breaches of competition law.