Microsoft Denies Overcharging UK Businesses as $2.8 Billion Cloud Lawsuit Advances

Microsoft is back under the antitrust lens in the UK, and this time nearly 60,000 British businesses have accused the company of charging them more than they should have to run Windows Server on cloud platforms that were not Azure. If found guilty, Microsoft may have to pay £2.1 billion (~ $2.81 billion) in fines.

Competition lawyer Maria Luisa Stasi is leading the case. According to a statement provided to Reuters by Statsi, Microsoft made Windows Server “more expensive” on Amazon, Google, and Alibaba’s clouds, turning Azure into the cheaper and easier default. Stasi’s team says Microsoft “degrades the user experience of Windows Server” on rival platforms.

Her lawyer, Sarah Ford, called it “a coherent abusive strategy to leverage Microsoft’s dominant position” in cloud computing. The interesting part here is that Microsoft denies all the allegations. The company asked the tribunal to drop the case.

The company says that Stasi’s filing “does not set out a proper blueprint” for calculating damages. Microsoft also says its “vertically integrated business” helps competition, not harms it. There is more context here if you don’t know what’s going on.

Regulators in the UK, Europe, and the United States are already probing cloud licensing behavior. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority previously concluded that Microsoft’s practices “reduced competition for cloud services by materially disadvantaging AWS and Google.” Microsoft denied those claims, saying regulators ignored that “the cloud market has never been so dynamic and competitive.”

All that said, the tribunal will decide whether this lawsuit moves ahead or not. Until then, the cloud battle is very much alive.