The company engages in a wide variety of business behaviors to compel customers to use their service. Anti-competitive behavior like this, license audits where you settle up with Azure credits, O365 tie in, etc.
In the other areas of the cloud market where these is competitive pressure, their offerings are competitive with AWS, GCP and others.
You could almost compare this to exfiltration costs the different cloud companies have. Where they have clear incentives not to make it cheap to offload all of your data. That does have obvious costs associated to the providers, at least.
Microsoft had clear rules for licensing on prem. You didn’t pay more to use HPE vs. Dell or Dell vs. Surface. If you chose to buy VMWare, same deal, as long as you followed certain licensing rules with respect to migration and other factors.
Now you pay a tax unless you use the favored provider. When I looked a couple of years ago, you could not license Windows client at all in cloud, unless you used on of the MS virtual desktop offerings.
Again, you can almost argue that clouds do this with expensive exfiltration costs. At least that corresponds to work you are asking them to do, though. This is purely a licensing trap to keep people from choosing an option.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/atr/merger-guidelines/tools/market-d...
The EU has demonstrated that they'll narrow the boundary of the market and ignore marketshare if they see there is an EU-centric advantage to be had.
This also lends into Google's opening wording where they frame the behaviour as a threat to the EU, rather than a threat to Google's Cloud business.
Or a more controversial take: The EU has demonstrated a naive over-eagerness to legislate in tech matters despite the absence of harm. (Versus a more conservative USA that is wary of upending industries without proven harm.)
You mean the EU is not as deeply corrupt as good old USA and actually cares about anti-competitive behavior. This is the opposite of the USA that will blow a LOT of hot air but never truly target and penalize any big company that is bribing the political establishment with campaign funding ?
If not, then Spotify would be a deemed a gatekeeper under the DMA. Instead Spotify met with the commission more than 65 times during the development of the DMA. Plus has the lowest pay out rates to artists of the leading music services, the fewest and slowest developing feature profile, the largest targeted consumer ad tracking network, and have progressively raised prices in recent months.
So no, the EU isn’t whatever you think it is.
What is wrong with that ? NO one should be forced to kneel to Apple's ridiculous criminal mafia pricing. Considering that Spotify sells music on its web-site, why should Apple abuse power to force payment through themselves, obtain a free pass on theft and mandate higher prices on everyone ? Blatant American corporate robbery through forced threats of expulsion should no longer be tolerated by the rest of the world and it is good that the EU is fighting back.
Tell me, what do you think 65 meetings are needed for when Spotify's dues to Apple are literally just the annual developer account fee.
So no, the EU isn't some bastion of fairness and moral right. By this example they're more corrupt and persuaded by their businesses than the USA.
Apple requires developers who use the entitlement to pay a 27 percent fee (reduced for subscriptions older than one year and for small businesses) on all website purchases referred by Apple. So if Spotify puts a link in its app and a user clicks it and subscribes, Spotify would owe Apple a 27 percent commission.
Directly after the European Commission's ruling, Spotify on March 5 submitted an EU app update that had information on subscription pricing and links to its websites for customers to make purchases. This was prior to when Apple had announced its entitlement plan.
Apple ignored Spotify's app update, and Spotify complained on March 14 that Apple had not "acknowledged or responded" to its App Store submission. Spotify at the time called on the European Commission to force Apple to approve its app update.
The antitrust ruling from the European Commission fined Apple nearly $2 billion and mandated that Apple "remove anti-steering provisions" for music apps in the European Economic Area.
And that is utterly just. The only "corruption" is Apple becoming a heady tyrant abusing the power of their platform as a hammer to rob the rest of the world. They have the corrupt US administration in their pocket, but thankfully, not the EU. The EU is one of the few governments that can actually stand up to American corporate tyranny and actually win.
That's such a backwards concept that you have in the US.
"This company is being anti-competitive, but haven't yet reached enough market power so we'll wait to address this problem until they have more market power", how does that make sense? That will only make it harder to fix in the future.
Attack the problem head on, before it becomes too large. But then we're talking about "The Land of Corporations" here so maybe I'm just being idealistic.
And enough on many Microsoft shops, especially due to stuff stuck on .NET Framework, Sharepoint, Active Directory and such.
Google filed this complaint to the European Commission - and given the EC’s recent decisions around the tech giants in general- it is probably wise for azure to address this now. This fee is brazenly anticompetitive.
There's certainly a case that can be made that having Windows licencing fees be many times more expensive (unless you use Microsoft's own cloud service) would be an instance of illegal tying.
> Antitrust concerns arise when such arrangements are used to maintain or augment the seller’s pre-existing market power or impair competition on the merits in the market for the tied product