Microsoft sued for £1 billion for inflating prices for Windows Server for clouds

Clients of the main competitors of the Microsoft Azure cloud service have filed a lawsuit against the software giant in a British court, accusing it of unfairly inflating the cost of licenses for software products. The plaintiffs are seeking £1 billion in damages.

Customers of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform or Alibaba Cloud are forced to pay more for a Windows Server license than for Microsoft Azure infrastructure, the lawsuit says. The company abuses its dominant position in the market for cloud server operating systems by inflating the prices of its products or encouraging customers to switch to Azure, the document says. The lawsuit “aims to challenge Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior, force it to reveal the amounts of illegal overpayments to UK companies and return money to organizations that are unfairly overcharged,” said plaintiffs’ lawyer Maria Luisa Stasi.

The class action is being brought against several thousand British companies and organizations – if Microsoft loses, any of the eligible entities can receive payment from it, even if they did not declare their participation in the proceedings. The attorneys represent customers of AWS, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud, but not the interests of any of these cloud providers themselves.

Previously, Microsoft paid €20 million to the association of cloud providers CISPE and agreed to equalize prices for its products across all platforms to avoid an antitrust investigation in the EU. But Google subsequently filed a separate complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission, again accusing the software giant of inflating the cost of software licenses for alternative cloud services to Azure.