Microsoft was accused in a London court on Thursday of overcharging nearly sixty thousand British businesses that run Windows Server on cloud platforms operated by Amazon, Google and Alibaba. The claim forms the basis of a £2.1bn lawsuit seeking to challenge how the company prices its software outside its own cloud service Azure.
The case is being brought by competition specialist Maria Luisa Stasi, who argues that Microsoft’s pricing model puts rival cloud providers at a disadvantage and forces customers to pay more if they choose alternatives. The hearing is a key step as Stasi asks the Competition Appeal Tribunal to certify the claim and allow proceedings to move ahead.
Stasi’s lawyer Sarah Ford told the tribunal that businesses had been charged higher fees for running Windows Server on competing platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. She said this made Azure comparatively cheaper and created financial pressure for customers to shift to Microsoft’s service.
Ford also argued that the company “degrades the user experience of Windows Server” when it is hosted on rival platforms. She described the approach as “a coherent abusive strategy to leverage Microsoft’s dominant position” in the cloud market.
Microsoft disputed those assertions. The company said the lawsuit fails to outline a workable method for calculating any alleged losses and should therefore be dismissed at this stage.
The hearing comes as regulators in Britain, the US and the EU conduct wider examinations of how large tech firms operate in the cloud sector. In July, a group formed by Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority said Microsoft’s licensing rules “materially disadvantaged” Amazon and Google by making it harder for customers to run Windows Server on their services.
Microsoft responded at the time by saying the report overlooked how competitive the cloud sector has become.
Stasi’s legal team is pushing for a collective action on behalf of around sixty thousand businesses that relied on Windows Server through third-party cloud providers. If the tribunal certifies the claim, it could mark one of the largest cloud-related competition cases brought in the UK.
Africa Digital News, New York
