Google files antitrust complaint with EU over Microsoft’s cloud business

The complaint, which was sent on Tuesday to the EU’s competition unit and which the Financial Times got an early look at, asserts that Microsoft is playing unfairly with its Azure cloud platform and that has led to a reduction in choice and an increase in prices.

It claims Microsoft uses its Windows software to lock customers into its Azure cloud services, and prevents them from easily switching to alternatives.

It describes this as ‘exploiting’ its customers’ reliance on Windows software by imposing ‘steep penalties’ on using rival cloud providers, according to the report.

We’re told the complaint claimed that a Microsoft customer who wants to move Windows software to Azure cloud ‘can do so essentially for nothing’, while if they wanted to do the same thing on another cloud platform, such as Google Cloud perhaps, they ‘must pay a 400 per cent mark-up to buy new Windows server licenses.’

The FT also reports that Google said in its complaint that ‘it was concerned that Microsoft was degrading the user experience of those customers that were moving their Windows software to competing cloud providers,’ and accused Microsoft of discriminatory practices since financial penalties only apply to Azure’s main rivals – namely AWS, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud.

Earlier on in the year, both Google and AWS took shots at Microsoft in the UK's CMA investigation into competition in the cloud services market. Google submitted comments in which it said: "Consistent with feedback from customers, Microsoft's licensing practices and certain related artificial technical barriers (e.g., in respect of IAM services) pose the most significant challenge to customers' ability to explore and/or adopt a multi-cloud or switching strategy."

Amazon, which leads the market with its AWS cloud platform, added: "One exception to the well-functioning nature of the market for IT services is Microsoft's licensing practices."

The CMA’s investigation is due to run into next April, and we’ll have to wait and see what comes out of Google’s reported complaint to the EU.

UPDATE - 17:45, 25 September 2024: Google has now published its own account of the action, which you can read here.