Google, a unit of Alphabet, complained to the European Commission on Wednesday about what it considered to be Microsoft’s anti-competitive practices of locking users into Azure, the company’s cloud platform.
Google claimed that Microsoft was abusing its dominant Windows Server operating system to stifle competition. Microsoft and Amazon Web Services are Google’s two main competitors in the cloud computing space.
Amit Zavery, vice president of Google Cloud, said during a conference that Microsoft charged users 400% more to continue using Windows Server on competing cloud service providers. This was not relevant if they were using Azure. According to Zavery, users of competing cloud services would likewise receive security patches less frequently and later.
Google cited a study conducted in 2023 by the cloud services organization CISPE, which discovered that European companies and government agencies were having to pay Microsoft licensing fines of up to 1 billion euros ($1.12 billion) annually.
Microsoft avoided an EU inquiry in July by reaching a 20-million-euro settlement with CISPE to resolve an antitrust allegation about its cloud computing licensing arrangements. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, and AliCloud were not included in the settlement, which drew criticism from the first two businesses.
Google claimed that Microsoft was employing the same strategy for Azure and had forced users to use the collaboration program Teams even if they had other options.
“The time to act is now,” Zavery said. “The cloud market will get more and more restrictive if things don’t happen now.” Google said that only regulatory action would end Microsoft’s “vendor lock” and level the playing field for competitors.
“We are asking the European Commission to act now. We’re asking them to really look at this issue, help customers decide, and keep the choices going for them,” Zavery said.
Google claimed that more than 70% of European firms used Microsoft’s Windows Server and other products.
Microsoft used to let its applications run on any kind of hardware, including laptops, but in 2019 it started to impose limits as it started to get into the cloud.
In the EU, the cloud computing industry is expanding at a rate of about 20% annually and has enormous potential. Less than half of the workloads at two-thirds of EU enterprises were on the cloud, according to McKinsey research published in April.
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