Germany’s antitrust authority to look into complaint against Microsoft

In the complaint, the group, which called itself the Coalition for a Level Playing Field, accused Microsoft of  pushing OneDrive “wherever users deal with file storage and Teams is a default part of Windows 11. This makes it nearly impossible to compete with their SaaS services. In the wider context, you see that over the last years, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have grown their market share to 66% of the total European market, with local providers contracting from 26% to 16%. Behavior like this is at the core of this growth of the tech giants and has to be stopped.”

The complaint went on to say, “the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition exists precisely for the purpose of preventing this kind of abusive behavior and keeping the market competitive and fair for all players.”

Another complaint, initially filed in 2019 and then revised in 2022, resulted in Microsoft reportedly agreeing to change its cloud computing practices in order to avoid an antitrust probe from the European Commission, the EU’s antitrust authority.

That filing was related to complaints made by European cloud companies, including Aruba, OVHcloud, Danish Cloud Community, and the Association of Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers (CISPE), about changes had Microsoft made to the terms of its outsourcing license agreement.

The cloud vendors had raised concerns after their customers were asked to pay more to run Microsoft software in non-Microsoft cloud environments, under what they saw as restrictive cloud licensing policies.

Microsoft reached agreements with both French cloud provider OVHcloud and CISPE in July.