Google sues Microsoft for alleged cloud monopoly

In a statement, Google explained that Microsoft’s software licensing conditions “prevent the transfer of current workloads from Azure (Microsoft’s cloud platform) to competing clouds.”

Companies that own Microsoft’s Windows Server operating system and want to run it on another cloud platform, such as Google Cloud or Amazon’s AWS, face exorbitant costs, which can reach a 400% increase in prices, as well as “limitations on security patches,” Google said.

According to the American giant, Microsoft began implementing increasingly severe restrictions on the use of its software starting in 2019, establishing multiple “interoperability barriers.”

Microsoft under the radar

The European Commission, which has already sanctioned Microsoft several times for anti-competitive practices, also opened an investigation in July 2023 against the multinational, suspecting that it abused its dominant position in software to promote the growth of its Teams communication tool to the detriment of its competitors.

This procedure forced the company founded by Bill Gates to announce last year the separation of its video conferencing application Teams from its office software such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, first in Europe and then worldwide.

However, these announcements have not convinced Brussels. The Commission considered in June that these changes were “insufficient to address its concerns and that it is necessary to further modify Microsoft’s behaviour in order to restore competition.”

Microsoft has promised to continue dialogue with Brussels and hopes to avoid a heavy fine, like the one it received in 2013, amounting to 561 million euros (about 600 million dollars), for imposing its Internet Explorer browser.