A coalition of software and cloud companies has filed a complaint with the European Commission (EC) against Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior of bundling its OneDrive cloud storage, Teams, and other services with Windows 10 and Windows 11.
The Coalition for a Level Playing Field includes several European Union (EU)-based companies led by open source hosted cloud storage vendor Nextcloud.
“This is quite similar to what Microsoft did when it killed competition in the [web] browser market, stopping nearly all browser innovation for over a decade. Copy an innovators' product, bundle it with your own dominant product and kill their business, then stop innovating,” says Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder of Nextcloud.
Big Tech
Arguing that Microsoft’s behavior is bad for the consumers, the coalition has asked the EC to enforce a level playing field for all the players, and ensure that Microsoft doesn’t leverage its dominant market position in the operating system sector to drive out competition in other segments.
Besides Nextcloud, the coalition includes several prominent open source, and non-profit organizations, such as European DIGITAL SME Alliance, the Document Foundation, and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).
On their homepage, the coalition suggests that the anti-competitive behaviour of Big Tech is not only killing competition, but in doing so is harming the consumers and business.
“Microsoft is integrating [Microsoft] 365 deeper and deeper in their service and software portfolio, including Windows. OneDrive is pushed wherever users deal with file storage and Teams is a default part of Windows 11. This makes it nearly impossible to compete with their SaaS [Software-as-a-Service] services,” reasons the coalition.
To further drive home the point, it argues that while Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have grown their market share to 66% in the EU, the share of local providers has contracted from 26% to 16%.
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