The European Commission has announced this Thursday the start of a formal investigation to determine whether the computer giant Microsoft violated competition rules in the European Union by linking its ‘Teams’ application for video calls with the installation of the Office software, a situation denounced by its competitor ‘Slack’ in July 2020 against Brussels.
The vice president of the Community Executive in charge of Competition, Margrethe Vestager, has pointed out the importance of guaranteeing that the sector “remains competitive” and that companies “are free to choose the products that best meet their needs” now that communication tools such as ‘ Teams’ have become “indispensable” in business activity.
Brussels fears that the US company is abusing its market position and restricting competition from other providers of cloud communication and collaboration services available in the European economic area.
In particular, community services want to investigate whether Microsoft gives a competitive distribution “advantage” to ‘Teams’ by not giving customers the ability to include or not include access to that product when they sign up for Office 365 or Microsoft packages. 365.
They also want to clarify whether this practice may have limited interoperability between their ‘suite’ products and other competing offerings, since this would result in anti-competitive obstacles that would prevent their customers from opting for providers of other similar tools.
Brussels has already informed the company itself and the competition authorities of the Member States of the opening of the in-depth investigation but it does not have a predetermined legal term to conclude the file and make a decision.
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