Microsoft’s Cloud Business Targeted by EU Antitrust Regulators | Investing News

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – EU antitrust regulators are quizzing Microsoft’s rivals and clients about its cloud small business and licensing offers, a questionnaire viewed by Reuters showed, in a transfer that could direct to a official investigation and renewed scrutiny of the U.S. program business.

The European Fee has fined Microsoft a whole 1.6 billion euros ($1.8 billion) in the preceding 10 years for breaching EU antitrust guidelines and for not complying with its purchase to halt anti-competitive tactics.

The organization identified alone on the EU competition enforcer’s radar once more right after German computer software company NextCloud, France’s OVHcloud and two other organizations filed problems about Microsoft’s cloud methods.

“The Fee has details that Microsoft may perhaps be employing its most likely dominant posture in certain program marketplaces to foreclose level of competition regarding particular cloud computing providers,” the questionnaire stated.

Regulators questioned if the conditions in Microsoft’s licensing bargains with cloud support suppliers allow rivals to contend successfully.

They also want to know if providers required Microsoft’s operating techniques and productivity purposes to complement their have cloud infrastructure presenting in order to contend properly.

Organizations also ended up questioned about the discrepancies in license costs and business terms in between the licensing bargains with cloud company vendors and an additional programme in which they package and indirectly resell Microsoft’s cloud solutions jointly with their individual.

Yet another emphasis was opportunity complex restrictions on cloud storage solutions out there on companies’ cloud infrastructure.

“We’re repeatedly assessing how we can most effective aid associates and make Microsoft software program obtainable to consumers across all environments, which include those people of other cloud companies,” Microsoft said in an emailed statement.

EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager before this 7 days claimed she has no issues but about cloud computing and cited the competition from Europe’s Gaia-X initiative.

(Writing by Foo Yun Chee Enhancing by Bill Berkrot)

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