Amazon Complains to UK CMA About Microsoft Cloud Licensing Too

Amazon has joined Google in complaining to regulators at the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) about Microsoft’s anti-competitive cloud licensing policies.

“To use many of Microsoft’s software products with these other cloud services providers, a customer must purchase a separate license even if they already own the software,” an Amazon response to the CMA investigation explains. “This often makes it financially unviable for a customer to choose a provider other than Microsoft.”

Amazon’s complaint dates back to November 23 but it was just published publicly today. Among its allegations is that Microsoft uses its licensing terms specifically to restrict customer choice and make switching off of Microsoft’s Azure service, in this case, more difficult. ” For example, Microsoft changed its licensing terms in 2019 and again in 2022 to make it more difficult for customers to run some of its popular software offerings on Google Cloud, [Amazon] AWS, and Alibaba.”

Google’s response to the CMA investigation of Microsoft was published late last week, and among its recommendations were that Microsoft be required to improve interoperability and deliver security updates to those customers that switch cloud providers.

Microsoft has also issued a response to the CMA and it argues that differences in each cloud service are caused by “competition in an innovation market” and not illegal business practices tied to licensing.

“There are many sources of competition in the cloud market in the UK,” Microsoft retorts. “Google, Oracle, IBM, and many other cloud players are also investing billions of pounds in cloud infrastructure globally to satisfy demand and are competing strongly for each customer workload where they operate … Microsoft welcomes the opportunity to engage with the CMA further on potential remedies as the market investigation progresses.”