But the landscape around regulating digital giants is in the process of changing in the EU so the Commission may be reconfiguring its response to complaints. It’s not clear why the EU has taken its time to act on what is, on the surface, a pretty straightforward complaint - about bundling and tying. Two years ago Slack urged EU regulators to move quickly. We’ve reached out to Slack for a response to the Commission investigation. Microsoft rebutted the accusations at the time by claiming Teams had been “embraced” by the market in “record numbers” as a result of COVID-19 driving uptake of video conferencing and other digital comms tools. We will continue to cooperate with the Commission and remain committed to finding solutions that will address its concerns.īack in July 2020, Slack made its complaint to the EU about Microsoft public - accusing the tech giant of illegally tying Teams into its market-dominant Office productivity suite and claiming its actions had resulted in “force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers”. We respect the European Commission’s work on this case and take our own responsibilities very seriously. Reached for comment, a Microsoft spokeswoman sent this statement: The Commission said Microsoft’s practices may constitute “anti-competitive tying or bundling” - meaning they could prevent suppliers of other communication and collaboration tools, such as Slack, from competing on a level playing field. “In particular, the Commission is concerned that Microsoft may grant Teams a distribution advantage by not giving customers the choice on whether or not to include access to that product when they subscribe to their productivity suites and may have limited the interoperability between its productivity suites and competing offerings.” “The Commission is concerned that Microsoft may be abusing and defending its market position in productivity software by restricting competition in the European Economic Area (‘EEA’) for communication and collaboration products,” it wrote. The move comes two years after rival workplace comms company Slack complained to the bloc that Microsoft was unfairly bundling the collaboration and comms software with its popular cloud-based productivity suites for business.Īnnouncing the probe, the European Commission said it will look into whether Microsoft may have breached EU competition rules by tying or bundling Teams to Office 365 and Microsoft 365. The European Union has finally announced a formal antitrust investigation of Microsoft’s bundling of Teams with Office 365 and Microsoft 365.
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