A visitor walks past the Google Cloud logo at the Mobile World Congress, the biggest annual gathering of the telecom industry in Barcelona on February 28, 2023. PHOTO AFP BRUSSELS - Alphabet's Google Cloud accused Microsoft of anti-competitive cloud computing practices and criticized imminent deals with European cloud vendors, saying these do not solve broader concerns about its licensing terms.
In Google Cloud's first public comments on Microsoft and its European deals, Vice-President Amit Zavery told Reuters that the company raised the issue with antitrust agencies and urged European Union antitrust regulators to take a closer look.
In May last year, Microsoft referred to a blog post where its president Brad Smith said it had a healthy number two position when it comes to cloud services, with just over 20 percent of global cloud services revenues.
Microsoft spokeswoman told Reuters on Thursday that they were committed to the European Cloud Community and their success.
There is a fierce rivalry between the two US tech giants in the multi-billion dollar cloud computing business, where Google trails market leader Amazon and Microsoft.
A person with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters this week that Microsoft offered to change its cloud computing practices in a deal with smaller rivals, which in turn will suspend their antitrust complaints.
The EU investigation will not be completed until the move is completed.
ALSO READ: Google wins in India's Android antitrust case.
Microsoft has a very anti-competitive posture in the cloud. In an interview late on Wednesday, Zavery said that they are leveraging a lot of their dominance in the on-premise business as well as Office 365 and Windows to tie Azure and the rest of cloud services and make it hard for customers to have a choice.
He said when we talk to a lot of our customers, they find a lot of bundling practices, as well as the way they create pricing and licensing restrictions make it hard for them to choose other providers.
Zavery said individual deals struck with several smaller European cloud vendors only benefit Microsoft.
They're selectively buying out those who complain and not making those terms available to everyone. That shows that they have so much market power that they can go and do things, and that makes it an unfair advantage to Microsoft and the people who complained back to Microsoft anyway. ALSO READ: Google opens access to its rival ChatGPT, Bard.
One or two vendors might settle doesn't solve the problem, but my point to the regulators is that they should look at this holistically. We need to solve the problem, not individual vendors' problems. Zavery dissented from the suggestion that the issue is merely a spat between Google and Microsoft.
I just want to make it clear. He said that the cloud was designed to have an open, flexible way to deploy software and give customers more choices so that they could run their software in any way they want to in a much more easy way.