Microsoft Corp. is on track to dodge a hefty antitrust fine after European Union watchdogs said they’re seeking feedback on the U.S. software giant’s offer to settle an investigation into illegal bundling of its Teams video-conferencing app.
The European Commission said Friday it’s started a so-called market test of Microsoft’s proposal to sell Teams separately and to improve interoperability with competing services. The move follows a formal warning issued last year over alleged abuse of market dominance. Positive responses from rivals and customers would allow the EU’s antitrust arm to drop the case without fines or findings of wrongdoing.
The Brussels-based authority said it “invites comments on commitments offered by the firm to address competition concerns over tying its communication and collaboration product Teams to its popular productivity applications included in its suites for businesses Office 365 and Microsoft 365, such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Outlook.”
Last year, the EU regulator alleged that Microsoft’s practice fell foul of the bloc’s competition rules. Since at least 2019, Microsoft’s behavior protected its dominance on the market and gave Teams an advantage over rivals, watchdogs said, claiming the advantage was boosted by limited interoperability between Teams and competing software.
‘More choices’
Nanna-Louise Linde, Microsoft’s vice president, European government affairs, said in a blog post that the offer follows several months of discussions with the commission and “represent a clear and complete resolution to the concerns raised by our competitors and will provide European customers with more choices.”
Linde said the proposals build on new options first introduced in 2023 by the company. Those options enabled customers to purchase versions of Microsoft’s business and enterprise productivity suites without Teams.
The new offer would require Microsoft to maintain availability of those suites over the next 7 years, and they set minimum price differences that Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft must maintain between the versions of those suites without and with Teams, she said.
If and when the EU signs off on the commitments “we have decided that we will, at the same time, align the options and pricing for our suites and Teams service globally, as we’ve done in the past,” Linde added.
The EU’s formal warning came after messaging platform Slack made a complaint to the EU’s antitrust watchdog 2019. Slack was acquired by Salesforce Inc., a provider of cloud-based customer management software, in a US$27.7 billion deal in 2021.
Samuel Stolton, Bloomberg News
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