A French cloud-computing company has filed an antitrust complaint in Europe against Microsoft Corp. adding to recent criticism of the competitive practices at a company that has largely avoided the recent regulatory scrutiny aimed at rival tech giants.
OVHcloud said it filed the complaint with the European Commission, the European Union’s top competition regulator. The complaint focuses on the way Microsoft licenses its products, such as its Office productivity suite, that may make it more expensive to use cloud services that compete with Microsoft’s Azure cloud, people familiar with the complaint said.
The complaint, which OVHcloud filed last summer but which hasn’t previously been reported, also alleges that Microsoft’s software doesn’t work as well on other cloud services, making it harder for them to compete, the people said.
“Through abusing its dominant position, Microsoft undermines fair competition and limits consumer choice in the cloud computing services market,” said a spokeswoman for OVHcloud, whose formal name is OVH Groupe SAS.
A Microsoft spokesman wouldn’t immediately confirm whether the company had been notified of the complaint, but said European cloud companies are building successful businesses using Microsoft products.
“Cloud providers enjoy many options to provide cloud services to their customers using Microsoft software, whether purchased by the customer or the partner,” the Microsoft spokesman said in a statement. “We’re continuously evaluating how we can best support partners and make Microsoft software available to customers across all environments, including those of other cloud providers.”
OVHcloud said the complaint was filed jointly with “several companies.” It wouldn’t name the other companies.
As governments around the world have gone after big tech companies, Microsoft has not been at the center of attention. The company has positioned itself as having learned from its own antitrust battles two decades ago when the U.S. Department of Justice and the EU sued the company for its business practices.
Most of the government scrutiny has targeted the other four big U.S. tech giants— Facebook -owner Meta Platforms Inc., Google- parent Alphabet Inc., Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. A 2020 report by the U.S. House Antitrust Subcommittee, for example, aimed its 16-month inquiry at the market power of those other four companies, not Microsoft.
While the European cloud market is growing, much of that growth has gone to the three largest U.S. cloud vendors, Microsoft, Amazon and Google Cloud. Those three now account for 69% of the European cloud market, according to Synergy Research Group. Deutsche Telekom is the largest European cloud provider with only 2% share of the European market, followed by OVHcloud with a 1% share, said Synergy.
It has been difficult for European cloud companies to compete with the scale and speed of which U.S. cloud companies are expanding, said Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale, adding that all three are pouring tens of billions into their cloud operations every quarter.
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