Google Files Antitrust Complaint Against Microsoft in Europe

Google said Wednesday it has filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft in the European Union, accusing Microsoft of using its dominance in business software to lock clients into its Azure cloud services.

The search giant argues Microsoft is violating European competition laws by charging punitive fees for its customers to transfer projects running on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform to a competing cloud service. In a blog post, Google said Microsoft's tactics are costing European businesses at least 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) per year and stifling competition in the lucrative cloud services industry.

Google's complaint, which could trigger an inquiry by Europe's competition commission, is the latest salvo in a long-running rivalry between two of the world's largest tech firms. Over the years, Google and Microsoft have each repeatedly accused the other of being a monopoly, with mixed results.

Google competes with Microsoft in multiple areas. Google's search engine is far more popular than Microsoft's Bing, but Microsoft has a bigger business selling cloud services and business software such as Microsoft Word. Google has long tried and failed to catch up to Amazon's and Microsoft's cloud businesses, which bring in billions of dollars a year for the companies and are central to the push to roll out artificial intelligence technology. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

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In a statement, Microsoft said it had amicably settled similar concerns raised by European cloud providers, referring to a deal struck this year with an industry association representing Amazon's cloud business and several smaller players. The smaller companies withdrew their complaint in exchange for Microsoft agreeing to make its tech work more seamlessly with those companies' platforms. Amazon was not part of the deal, and Google criticized the agreement in its blog post Wednesday.

Microsoft suggested Google was attempting to revive that earlier complaint. "Having failed to persuade European companies, we expect Google similarly will fail to persuade the European Commission," the statement said. The European Commission, which enforces E.U. laws, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In 2011, Microsoft filed a complaint with European regulators accusing Google of monopolizing web search and advertising. Google first went public with its accusations against Microsoft in the cloud sector with a letter to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission last year.

Microsoft is already facing a separate antitrust investigation in Europe over its practice of bundling its chat and videoconferencing service, Teams, with its other popular business products. That inquiry stems from a 2020 complaint filed by Slack, owned by cloud business software provider Salesforce.

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Microsoft's cloud practices are also under investigation by the United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority.

Google is facing several antitrust attacks in the United States. A federal judge ruled in August that Google has an illegal monopoly in search. The company is also on trial defending a case brought by the U.S. government accusing it of using anticompetitive practices in the advertising technology market.

Cloud computing has become a key source of revenue and profit for U.S. tech giants, including Microsoft, Google and Amazon. A boom in AI technology is expected to drive even more demand for those services, with the companies spending billions to expand the data centers that power cloud platforms.

— Will Oremus and Gerrit De Vynck, The Washington Post