Google has filed a complaint with the European Commission about Microsoft’s practices in the cloud computing space, accusing its rival of stifling competition with licensing terms that lock customers into Azure.
The tech giant alleges that Microsoft has “severely limited consumer choice” with its licensing terms, such as imposing steep financial penalties on businesses that seek to use its Windows software on other cloud services.
“Cloud-based computing is one of the most important developments in the European economy over the last decade,” Google Cloud executives wrote in a blog post Wednesday.
However, they argued that “legacy licensing practices that force customers onto a single vendor threaten Europe’s ability to take full advantage of this opportunity.”
Google highlighted a preliminary finding by the European Commission in June that Microsoft had breached European Union (EU) antitrust laws by tying its collaboration tool Teams to its suites of productivity tools, Microsoft 365 and Office 365.
It accused Microsoft of “running the same playbook” to push companies toward its cloud computing platform Azure.
Microsoft agreed to pay €20 million, or about $21.7 million, to settle similar accusations about its cloud practices from an organization representing Amazon and several small European cloud providers earlier this year, according to Reuters.
“Microsoft settled amicably similar concerns raised by European cloud providers, even after Google hoped they would keep litigating,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement.
“Having failed to persuade European companies, we expect Google similarly will fail to persuade the European Commission,” they added.
However, Google dismissed this development as insufficient, suggesting that Microsoft had “struck one-off deals with a small group of companies” but had not altered its practices.
