The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has launched an antitrust investigation into Microsoft, Bloomberg reported. According to agency sources, the commission sent a detailed request to the company to provide information related to software licensing, cybersecurity and AI. Thus, Microsoft became the fifth major technology organization to come under antitrust investigation.
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According to the source, the voluminous questionnaire, including hundreds of pages, was compiled after more than a year of informal interviews by antitrust authorities with Microsoft competitors and business partners. The regulator is interested in all aspects of its activities, from cloud computing and licensing of the company’s software to cybersecurity proposals and artificial intelligence products. The focus is on Microsoft combining its popular productivity and security productivity and security software with its Azure cloud offerings.
The FTC’s interest in Microsoft’s cloud business has intensified following several security incidents involving its products. Also important is the fact that Microsoft is a leading software supplier to US government agencies.
In a November 2023 report, the FTC expressed concern that the concentrated nature of the cloud market means that “outages or other problems that impair the quality of a cloud provider’s services could have a cascading effect on the economy or certain sectors.”
The government’s cyber security council concluded earlier this year that “Microsoft’s security culture is inadequate and needs to be overhauled, particularly in light of the company’s central role in the technology ecosystem.” The CrowdStrike system outage, which affected 8.5 million Windows computers, further raised regulators’ concerns about Microsoft’s state of affairs.
The company faced an antitrust lawsuit from the US Department of Justice in the late 1990s for combining its web browser and Windows OS, but in recent years it has largely avoided antitrust charges, unlike Amazon, Apple, Meta✴ and Google.