Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

According to news in the morning of November 9, Beijing time, Microsoft's cloud computing business is facing new antitrust complaints at a time when the acquisition of Activision Blizzard is facing antitrust scrutiny in the European Union. On Wednesday, local time, the trade group CISPE, whose members include Amazon, filed a complaint with the EU antitrust regulator.

CISPE said that the new terms of the contract implemented by Microsoft on October 1 and other practices of the company are causing irreparable damage to the European cloud computing ecosystem.

Amazon is the market leader in cloud computing, followed by Microsoft and Alphabet's Google.

"as European customers seek to move to the cloud, Microsoft uses its dominant position in productivity software to limit customer choices and increase customer costs, thereby affecting Europe's digital economy," CISPE Secretary General Francisco Mingorance said in a statement.

In its complaint to the European Commission, CISPE alleges that it used its dominant position in productivity software to direct European customers to its own Azure cloud computing infrastructure, putting European competitors at a disadvantage.

The group said Microsoft's anti-competitive practices included discriminatory bundling and tying of its products, favorable pricing, and targeting customers at the technical and competitive levels.

Microsoft, which has been fined more than 1.6 billion euros by the European Commission for various monopolistic practices over the past decade, has previously said it provides its software to all customers, including competitors' cloud providers.

Cloud service providers in Germany, Italy, Denmark and France, two of which are members of CISPE, have filed similar complaints with the Commission in the past few years.

Microsoft subsequently revised the license agreement and made other changes to make it easier for cloud service providers to compete with them from October 1 to avoid antitrust penalties from the European Union. However, its competitors Amazon, Alphabet's Google and Microsoft's own cloud services are excluded from these changes.

CISPE said the EU competition watchdog should address the problem by applying to Microsoft the fair software licensing principles it developed last year.

The agency believes that the EU could set up an independent European Observatory (European Observatory) to audit the license terms of dominant software companies.

CISPE also said that the European Commission could add another provision to the newly adopted rules for technology companies, the Digital Market Act (Digital Markets Act), which forbids cloud computing dominant companies from favouring their own software programs.

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