The US Federal Trade Commission has opened an antitrust investigation into Microsoft, Bloomberg reported. According to agency sources, the commission has sent a detailed request to the company for information related to software licensing, cybersecurity and AI. Microsoft thus became the fifth major technology organization to come under antitrust investigation.
According to the source, the voluminous questionnaire, including hundreds of pages, was compiled after more than a year of informal interviews by the antitrust authorities with competitors and business partners of Microsoft. The regulator is interested in all aspects of business, from cloud computing and company software licensing to cybersecurity offerings and artificial intelligence products. The focus is on Microsoft combining its popular productivity and security software with its Azure cloud offerings.
The FTC's interest in Microsoft's cloud business has intensified after several security incidents involving its products. Also important is the fact that Microsoft is a leading software provider for 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 degrade 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 reviewed, especially 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 regulatory concerns about Microsoft's health.
It will be recalled that the company faced an antitrust case from the US Department of Justice in the late 1990s over the combination of its web browser and Windows OS, but has largely avoided antitrust charges in recent years. unlike Amazon, Apple and Google.