Google files Brussels complaint against Microsoft cloud business

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Google has filed an antitrust complaint in Brussels against Microsoft, alleging its Big Tech rival engages in unfair cloud computing practices that has led to a reduction in choice and an increase in prices.

The US search giant has accused Microsoft of leveraging its Windows software to lock customers into its Azure cloud services, preventing them from easily switching to alternatives. 

In a complaint sent to the European Commission, seen by the Financial Times, Google said Microsoft is “exploiting” its customers’ reliance on products such as its Windows software by imposing “steep penalties” on using rival cloud providers.

Writing to antitrust investigators, Google said that a Microsoft customer who wants to move Windows software to Azure cloud “can do so essentially for nothing”, while a customer who wants to do the same to a cloud competitor “must pay a 400 per cent mark-up to buy new Windows server licenses”.

Amit Zavery, vice-president for Google Cloud, told reporters in Brussels on Wednesday that the search giant wants EU regulators to force Microsoft to remove restrictions on using cloud services from rivals. “If I already paid for these licenses, I should be able to use it where I choose to,” he said.

A complaint does not guarantee a formal probe, which would then take years to be resolved. But the move is a rare escalation between large tech players in Brussels, but comes with Google behind Microsoft and Amazon Web Services in the global cloud computing market.

Google’s complaint comes after Microsoft successfully clinched a multimillion dollar deal with a group of rival cloud providers in July to avoid a formal investigation in Brussels over its dominance in the market.

Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, said his company’s deal resolved past concerns and brought even more competition to the sector.

Google also said in its complaint, which was sent on Tuesday to the EU’s powerful competition unit, that it was concerned that Microsoft was degrading the user experience of those customers that were moving their Windows software to competing cloud providers.

It also accused Microsoft of discriminatory practices as the financial penalties only apply to Azure’s main rivals, AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Alibaba Cloud.