Google Issues Microsoft Antitrust Complaint in the EU

Google has issued its first-ever formal antitrust complaint, alleging to EU regulators that Microsoft’s cloud licensing is anti-competitive.

“Microsoft’s licensing terms restrict European customers from moving their current Microsoft workloads to competitors’ clouds – despite there being no technical barriers to doing so – or impose what Microsoft admits is a striking 400 percent price markup,” Google notes. “To give voice to the complaints we hear from customers – and from across the industry – and to seek a resolution that will benefit everyone, we are now taking the next step of filing a formal complaint with the European Commission.”

The online giant has been grousing about Microsoft’s cloud licensing terms for years, hoping to convince European cloud vendors to support its cause and influence the European Commission to take action. Those efforts failed, however: Microsoft settled with the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) trade group and successfully avoided antitrust charges. So now Google, a distant third in this market, is pushing forward on its own.

The core issue is easily understood: According to Google, Microsoft’s licensing terms make it more expensive to run Microsoft 365 and Office services on competing cloud infrastructure, and difficult to impossible to move those workloads off Azure.

“We would like the cloud market to remain and become very vibrant and open for all the providers including European vendors, vendors like us, AWS and others,” Google Cloud head of platform Amit Zavery told CNBC. “Today the restrictions do not allow choice for customers.”

While Microsoft controls an estimated 65 to 70 percent of the cloud productivity market in Europe, the software giant feels that its recent settlement addresses the concern. And it, like Amazon before it, eliminated so-called exit fees this past March, just two months after Google did so.

“Microsoft settled amicably similar concerns raised by European cloud providers, even after Google hoped they would keep litigating,” a Microsoft statement notes. “Having failed to persuade European companies, we expect Google similarly will fail to persuade the European Commission.”