The EU investigation is on the brink of Microsoft’s cloud

Microsoft must offer more or better so that its pricing and sales practices on the market of cloud services are not suitable for displacing small competitors, thus distorting competition in Europe – believe the local rivals of the Redmond giant, who first approached the European Commission in 2021 with their complaint Committee objecting to the company’s business practices.

Since then, in response to the statement of objections sent to it by the Commission, Microsoft has undertaken to change its market practice, however, this is not considered adequate and sufficient by the smaller market players – writes exclusive in his reporting a Reuters.

The complaint was first brought to the Commission by the French cloud service provider OVHCloud. In it, he objected that Microsoft’s license for its own products makes it more expensive for other users to use cloud services that are a competitor of Microsoft Azure, the same was objected by the German service provider Nextcloud and two other companies.

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The Redmond-based giant essentially billed customers who ran its products in Microsoft’s cloud less than those who chose to use another provider’s data center, say Google or Amazon.

The Redmond company therefore announced in May that it would change the pricing of its service, but only for smaller and exclusively European service providers. However, this still put major cloud competitors such as Google and Amazon at a disadvantage, so according to the professional association of European cloud infrastructure providers, CISPE (whose members include Amazon AWS, Aruba and OVHcloud), the amendment was not enough , and does not bring any substantial change in the management of anti-competitive behavior.

Virtually the same has now been confirmed by representatives of CISPE and the complainants, Nextcloud and OVHcloud, separately to Reuters, as the deadline for the Commission to decide whether to launch a formal competition investigation into the case drew closer. in fact, he does not see the claims in the submissions of the competitors as proven.