Microsoft’s try to keep away from deeper EU scrutiny of its Groups video conferencing app has failed, with the bloc’s antitrust authorities making ready a proper grievance in opposition to the corporate’s conduct.
Microsoft’s current proposal to separate its Groups from a broader enterprise software program suite and promote it to clients individually with an annual low cost was not sufficient to fulfill regulators’ considerations, in keeping with folks aware of the matter, who spoke on the situation of anonymity.
The European Fee is making ready an announcement of objections to ship to the corporate, which may very well be issued within the subsequent few months, the sources mentioned.
On the finish of August, Microsoft tried to allay considerations raised by the EU’s antitrust arm as a part of a brand new investigation into how Groups was linked to Workplace 365 and Microsoft 365 packages. The EU investigation adopted a grievance from Salesforce’s messaging platform Slack about three years in the past.
Microsoft and the Fee declined to touch upon the European Union’s subsequent steps.
Microsoft, headquartered in Redmond, Washington, faces no less than two different complaints filed with European Union regulators. They embrace considered one of a European cloud group with Amazon.com’s AWS amongst its members that accuses Microsoft of utilizing unfair licensing practices to lure EU clients to its cloud infrastructure.
One other grievance, filed by German cloud platform NextCloud GmbH in 2021, complains that Microsoft bundles its OneDrive cloud system with the Home windows working system. Redmond Microsoft can also be dealing with an investigation from European Union digital antitrust regulators, who’re inspecting whether or not Bing, Edge and promoting companies ought to come alongside. Below the scope of the bloc’s Digital Markets Act, which units out a collection of do’s and don’ts for large tech firms.
First revealed: September 19, 2023 | 12:37 am he
(tags for translation) European Union
