Microsoft faces lawsuit from Spanish companies over cloud tactics.

Yasir Ali2 weeks ago

2 10 3 minutes read

Microsoft faces lawsuit from Spanish companies over cloud tactics.

The newest complaint over Microsoft’s rapidly expanding cloud computing services came on Tuesday, after a trade organization’s EU protest. The Spanish startup group filed a complaint against the company’s cloud operations with the Spanish antitrust agency (MSFT.O), opening a new tab.

The dominant player Amazon (AMZN.O) is ahead of the US tech giant in the online computing space, but the two are anticipated to close quickly as OpenAI’s technology powers a slew of generative AI capabilities that appeal to corporate customers.

The Spanish Entrepreneur Association, that advocates for over 700 businesses throughout Spain, referenced many purportedly anti-competitive actions carried out by Microsoft in the past few years.

“Microsoft has not only taken advantage of the dominant position in the markets of Operating Systems (Windows) and traditional productivity software (Microsoft Office, Windows Server, SQL Server) to force the use of its Azure cloud, but they have also imposed artificial barriers that limit the ability of startups to compete fairly and competitively,” the complaint seen by news website said.

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“These practices include barriers to data portability or contractual conditions that restrict competition in software licenses, preventing the free choice of providers of these services, reducing the capacity for choice and flexibility that startups need to be able to be resilient, innovate and grow,” the document said.

The group demanded that the Spanish competition authority open an inquiry and act quickly to protect the competitive market.

“We feel that all organizations should be permitted to succeed in an equal environment so that they do not fall behind as customers or providers of this technology,” said Carlos Mateo, chairman of the Spanish Entrepreneur Association, in a statement.

CISPE, a group that Amazon is a part of, filed a complaint with EU antitrust regulators in November of last year, citing harm to the European IT cloud ecosystem caused by Microsoft’s new contract conditions that were implemented on October 1st, among other things.

Together with the UK Competition as well as Markets Authority, and European Commission has questioned cloud competitors over Microsoft’s request for user data as part of its probe.