Microsoft faced a fresh challenge on Tuesday as the Spanish Startup Association lodged a complaint with the Spanish antitrust regulator concerning the tech giant’s cloud practices. This complaint adds to the mounting grievances against Microsoft’s rapidly expanding cloud computing services, following a similar complaint lodged by a trade group in the EU.
Although Amazon currently leads the cloud computing sector, Microsoft ranks second and is poised to narrow the gap swiftly, bolstered by a range of generative AI features powered by OpenAI’s technology that appeal to business users.
The Spanish Startup Association, representing over 700 startups in Spain, highlighted several allegedly anti-competitive practices by Microsoft in recent years. According to the complaint seen by Reuters, Microsoft leveraged its dominant position in markets such as Operating Systems (Windows) and traditional productivity software (Microsoft Office, Windows Server, SQL Server) to promote its Azure cloud. Additionally, the association accused Microsoft of imposing artificial barriers that hinder startups’ ability to compete fairly and effectively.
These alleged practices include barriers to data portability and contractual conditions that limit competition in software licenses, thereby constraining startups’ freedom to choose service providers and reducing the flexibility needed for innovation and growth.
Carlos Mateo, president of the Spanish Startup Association, emphasized the importance of fostering a competitive market environment where all companies can compete on equal footing. He stated, “We believe that all companies should be able to compete in an environment of equality so as not to be left behind either as customers or as companies providing this technology.”
The association urged the Spanish competition watchdog to initiate an investigation and implement urgent measures to ensure a competitive market landscape.
This complaint from the Spanish Startup Association comes on the heels of a similar action by Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE), which includes Amazon among its members. Last November, CISPE raised concerns with EU antitrust regulators regarding Microsoft’s new contract terms imposed on October 1, along with other practices, which were perceived as detrimental to the European cloud computing ecosystem.
As regulatory scrutiny intensifies, the European Commission and the UK Competition and Markets Authority are actively investigating Microsoft’s practices in the cloud computing sector, reflecting the growing significance of these issues on both regional and global scales.