For AWS and Google to encourage the British competitive regulator to “intervene and limit the price” that Microsoft charges them to licensed his software in their clouds, is both “extraordinary and unprecedented”.
Whether that says Microsoft in a response to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the British Anti-Trust Police who spent a provisional statement in January on the Parlous State of the health of the British Cloud Computing sector: Competition could be better, said it, said, and the tactics of non-microsoft, and the tactics of Nietiek.
AWS and Google are classified by Microsoft as stated providers, because such clients want to perform – for example – Windows Server, have to pay a maximum of four times more to do this in that non -azure clouds. Both suppliers complained that this led them and their customers to a disadvantage.
The CMA agreed: “Microsoft has the option and the incentive to partially close AWS and Google with the help of the relevant Microsoft -Software products and that the behavior damages competition in cloud services.”
Now Microsoft has thrown away the gloves and came out as an answer (pdf):
“In short, Amazon and Google ask the CMA to intervene and limit the price that Microsoft can charge when they use Microsoft’s software to build and sell cloud services to their customers and the Microsoft price charges his customers on Azure for the use of Microsoft software.
“This is an extraordinary and unprecedented intervention, which is rough about the intellectual property rights of Microsoft. No other software provider in the industry would be subject to similar limitations,” says Microsoft.
The “only beneficiaries of this remedy” are Amazon and Google, adds the submission of Microsoft. Undoubtedly, some customers who do not want to perform Microsoft Wares in Azure – for whatever reason – can exception.
Google has described earlier to The register What it sees as a “software tax” that Microsoft has charged Google and AWS customers since 2019. Google submitted its very first anti-trust complaint against Microsoft to the European Commission in September.
Earlier research in Europe by Frédéric Jenny, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the Essec Paris Business, commissioned by AWS Backed Trade Group Cispe, discovered that customers in Europe jointly received ten -digit amounts because of Microsoft’s that bring your own licensing policy.
Microsoft says that it is “owed” to its old software operation, it is ready to move workload from private data centers to the cloud. It is preferable to choose Azure, although ‘our software is also available on other public clouds, including AWS and Google Cloud.
“We compete to win their business in different ways, including competing prices. A way in which we know that we are planning to offer attractive prices in our marketing efforts is to offer a permanent offer to demand Azure and the part of the price that can be granted to Windows Server and SQULE SERVER Software.
It requires the CMA to compare this strategy with AWS’s S3, Aurora, Dynamodb and Google’s Bigquery, Looker, Google Analytics and more.
“Give AWS and Google their own software to their competitors, at all for a price? They don’t do that.” The entry adds: “You can see how we can feel unfair.”
The protests of his large rivals rings hollow, says Microsoft, because AWS is the largest cloud computing supplier in the UK – where it was good for a maximum of 50 percent of the £ 9 billion ($ 11.4 billion) customers who were published in 2023. Microsoft was good between 30 and 40 percent. Google Cloud is a distant third, but it has grown into a run-rate operation of $ 36 billion worldwide from calendar Q4.
Microsoft also says that Google has “sunk thousands, if not millions of dollars to get up and to support ‘trade associations’, who are not surprising with competition authorities and government officials.”
It is correct that Google tried to become a member of Cispe and offer a good cent in the process, but Microsoft apparently had more success in realizing that trading extension. Google has since become a member of the Open Cloud Coalition (OCC) and Microsoft has already branded this as a lobby group, Astro-Turfing officials.
Egress compensations, a high level of market concentration and significant entry thresholds are other concerns that have expressed the CMA on the total cloud market in Great Britain. AWS has also arrived for serious criticism, although Google received a get-out-of-jail card as was found in the UK to have a “much smaller market share”. (Shhh, don’t tell investors, keep this between Google and the CMA.)
The CMA now delegates whether he should use his digital markets powers to make interventions with regard to the barriers it identified, namely Egress fees, technical barriers and the license practices of Microsoft. A final decision is expected later this year.
The register This week is planning to port other submissions from cloud sellers to the CMA. ®
