BRUSSELS, March 30 (Portal) – Alphabet’s Google Cloud (GOOGL.O) has accused Microsoft (MSFT.O) of anti-competitive cloud computing practices and has criticized upcoming deals with several European cloud providers licensing terms.
In Google Cloud’s first public comments on Microsoft and its European deals, Vice President Amit Zavery told Portal the company had raised the issue with antitrust authorities and asked the European Union’s antitrust authorities to take a closer look.
In response, Microsoft pointed to a blog post last May in which its president, Brad Smith, said it “occupies a healthy number two in cloud services, with just over 20 percent market share of global cloud services revenue.” .
“We are committed to the European cloud community and its success,” a Microsoft spokesman told Portal on Thursday.
There is an intense rivalry between the two US tech giants in the fast-growing, multi-billion dollar cloud computing business, where Google lags behind market leader Amazon (AMZN.O) and Microsoft.
The sector has recently come under increased regulatory scrutiny, including in the United States and the United Kingdom, due to the dominance of a few players and its increasingly critical role as more companies move their services to the cloud.
Microsoft has offered to change its cloud computing practices in a deal with some smaller competitors, which will in turn sit out their antitrust grievances, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told Portal this week.
The move will fend off an EU probe.
“Microsoft definitely has a very anti-competitive stance in the cloud. They’re using much of their dominance in the on-premises business and Office 365 and Windows to tie into Azure and the rest of the cloud services and make it difficult for customers to choose,” Zavery said in an interview late Wednesday.
“When we speak to many of our customers, they find that many of these bundling practices, as well as the way they create price and licensing constraints, make it difficult for them to choose other providers,” he added.
‘UNFAIR ADVANTAGE’
Zavery said individual deals with multiple smaller European cloud providers only benefit Microsoft.
“They are selectively buying up those who complain and not making those terms available to everyone. That definitely makes it an unfair advantage for Microsoft and still ties the people who complained to Microsoft.”
“Whatever they offer there should be terms for all, not just one or two that they pick and choose and that shows you that they have so much market power that they can sort of do these things individually. “
“My point to regulators would be that while one or two vendors may not solve the overall problem, they should look at this holistically. And that’s the problem we really need to solve, not the problems of individual vendors.”
The European Commission declined to comment.
Microsoft is still facing another EU antitrust complaint from CISPE, of which Amazon is a member. The trade group has rejected Microsoft’s changes.
Zavery dismissed the suggestion that the issue was merely a dispute between Google and Microsoft.
“The question is not related to Google. I just want to be very clear. It’s the cloud. The premise of the cloud was to have an open, flexible way to deploy your software and give customers more choices so they could run their software anywhere they choose in a much simpler way,” he said.
Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by Alexander Smith
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