Transparency? Redmond's heard of it:
Microsoft is close to resolving antitrust complaints lodged against it with the European Commission by local suppliers OVHcloud, Aruba S.p.A and Danish Cloud Community (DCC) over alleged commercial abuses.
The details of the said settlement remain under wraps and likely won't be published in detail, which is frustrating others' efforts to take the US software and cloud giant to task over alleged controlling market behavior.
OVHcloud, Aruba and DCC fired a joint complaint against Microsoft in May, with OVH itself confirming they were pressing the authorities for a "level playing field among cloud providers," saying Microsoft "undermines fair competition."
The complaint was focused on the higher costs of buying and running Microsoft software in clouds other than Azure, and technical adjustments needed to run some programs on competitors' clouds.
Fast-forward to this week and chatty sources close to the situation indicate Microsoft has agreed to settle the case and will propose binding commitments imminently, according to Bloomberg.
[...] Representing 24 cloud providers, the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) group itself filed a formal competition complaint against Microsoft in November, saying the vendor uses: "unjustified and discriminatory bundling, tying, self-preferencing pricing and technical and economic lock-in" to "restrict choice".
It claimed the actions of Microsoft were in violation of Article 102 TFEU, and provide grounds for the EC to launch a formal investigation.
Francisco Mingorance, Secretary General at CISPE, which counts OVH, Aruba and many others as members, told us today the decision by the trio to settle with Microsoft was "disappointing on many levels."
[...] In a statement from the US-based Coalition for Fair Software Licensing, executive director Ryan Triplette claimed: "News that Microsoft is expected to concede and reach settlements with three European cloud providers is an admission of its anticompetitive tactics and unfair licensing practices."
[...] "These private settlements will not resolve or address the company's restrictive software licensing tactics that continue to limit choice for cloud customers worldwide. Until Microsoft honors its commitment to remedy these concerns, cloud customers will continue to suffer from higher prices and fewer choices."
[...] Frank Karlitschek, CEO at founder at Nextcloud GmbH, said in a statement: "Microsoft continues to act as a gatekeeper, picking the winners and losers. And of course, its own services benefit immensely from this, getting shielded from the competition.
"This brazen effort of promoting its own services at the expense of competitors and distorting the market in their favor harms the consumer, the wider market, and European businesses, and threatens the digital sovereignty of countries."
Microsoft is gaining ground in the game console sector, is investing in AI and the "third pillar" is cloud computing, said Auke Haagsma, former head of unit at the European Commission and a strategic advisor to CISPE last month.
"Cloud services benefit from scale – not just in terms of cost efficiency but in harvesting, mining and driving insights from the masses of data that cross them," he wrote in Euroactiv.
"The cloud, AI and gaming are the foundations of the next wave of growth and innovation in the digital world. Allowing dominance to develop in any one of these areas would stymie European businesses' opportunity to compete and damage the EU's wider digital and sustainability goals. "Allowing one company to dominate all three critical elements would be catastrophic to competition in digital markets," he said.
