• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 25, 2024

Google has filed an antitrust complaint in Brussels against Microsoft, accusing Microsoft of engaging in unfair cloud-computing practices that led to a reduction of choice and an increase in prices. 

Using the European Union's and U.S. Department of Justice's reasons for filing antitrust lawsuits against the company, Google said Microsoft leverages its Windows software to lock customers into its Azure cloud services, preventing them from easily switching to alternatives.

Google alleged that Microsoft’s licensing practices lock business customers into using its Azure cloud computing platform. And that Microsoft is the only cloud provider that uses such tactics, which stifles competition, costs businesses more and exposes them to bigger security risks, Google wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

Microsoft has locked customers into Teams for years, Google alleges, even when they preferred other providers. Now, the company is doing the same to push companies to its cloud platform Azure. Google claims Microsoft’s licensing terms restrict European customers from moving their current Microsoft workloads to competitors’ clouds, although there are no technical barriers.

Google explained in the post how Microsoft customers can move Windows software to Azure cloud for essentially nothing, but those who want to do the same to a cloud competitor must pay a 400% price markup.

In fact, Google pointed to Microsoft’s licensing practices and how they apply to many enterprise products, Windows Servers, which are central to many company strategies.

“When businesses and governments originally paid for Windows Server licenses, they had the right to run them on any hardware they wished – and did so for many years on machines from HP, Dell, Lenovo, and others,” Google wrote.

Google said Microsoft initially allowed companies to move to any cloud provider, but as Azure faced more competition, the company introduced new rules that severely limited customer choice.

In 2019, Microsoft changed its licensing terms to impose “extreme financial penalties” on businesses that want to use Windows Server software on rival services like Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services.