“Muddying the waters”: Microsoft accused Amazon and Google of pretending to be weak and helpless in front of the British regulator CMA

Microsoft accused competitors Google and Amazon of “muddying the waters” by actually interfering with an antitrust investigation in the UK, ComputerWeekly reports. The corresponding statements are presented in Microsoft’s public appeal to the British regulator Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).

The CMA’s June 2024 submissions suggested that Microsoft’s licensing practices for products and services could reduce competition between cloud companies in the UK – using licensed Microsoft software in third-party business clouds could be more expensive for customers and impact the competitiveness of other cloud providers. Google and AWS have repeatedly complained to the British regulator about Microsoft.

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Google’s investigative materials indicate that Microsoft’s licensing practices weaken competitors and increase their costs. Artificial restrictions make Microsoft’s software too expensive to run on third-party clouds, and competitors can’t counteract significant price differences. Google Cloud emphasizes that the cloud helps the UK’s digital economy, but unfair licensing mechanisms do not give customers freedom of choice and do not allow innovation.

AWS takes a similar position. The company said the only exception to the UK’s healthy IT services market was Microsoft’s licensing practices. Amazon is optimistic about the evolution of the CMA’s views on providing UK users with a free choice of cloud to run popular Microsoft apps.

Microsoft itself disputes the claims and emphasizes that neither Google nor AWS are suffering to the extent they are trying to portray. Microsoft argues that its software licensing terms do not lead to significant cost increases when using competitors’ clouds. It also stated that Amazon and Google’s businesses appear to have enough margins to make a profit even in a competitive environment. The company recalled that the capital expenditures of both competitors are $50 billion and $30 billion, respectively – this in itself indicates their confidence in profitability and competitiveness.

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So we are not talking about weakened, hopeless competitors, as companies are trying to present themselves as, allegedly unable to pay for the large-scale use of its intellectual property, Microsoft says. Moreover, over the past couple of years, Google and AWS’s revenue has only grown – this is the fruit of competition, not the lack of it. Microsoft explicitly stated that rivalry is not “soft” or “weak” – the companies “hit each other with all their might.” According to the IT giant, Amazon, Google and CISPE are simply “muddying the waters” on the issue of determining right and wrong competition.

The CMA investigation was launched in October 2023, with a deadline for completion of 4 April 2025. Recently, Microsoft, after negotiations, achieved a reconciliation with CISPE, agreeing to pay compensation in the amount of $22 million in exchange for small cloud operators abandoning claims against it. At the same time, the new Microsoft licensing rules in Europe did not affect AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Alibaba Cloud. It subsequently turned out that Google tried to offer CISPE more significant compensation in exchange for continuing litigation with Microsoft.