The US Federal Trade Commission has opened an antitrust investigation Microsoft The corporation is drilling into everything from the company’s cloud computing and software licensing businesses to cybersecurity offerings and artificial intelligence products.
After more than a year of conducting informal interviews with competitors and business partners, antitrust enforcers have prepared a detailed request to compel Microsoft to provide information, according to people familiar with the matter. The demand, which runs into hundreds of pages, has been sent to the company after FTC Chair Leena Khan signed it, one of the people said.
FTC antitrust lawyers are set to meet with Microsoft’s competitors next week to gather more information about the Redmond, Washington-based company’s business practices, according to two other people familiar with the plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the confidential matter. asked to take
Microsoft and the FTC declined to comment.
The FTC’s investigation of Microsoft’s cloud computing business gained steam after a series of cybersecurity incidents involving the company’s products. The company is a top government contractor, providing billions of dollars worth of software and cloud services to US agencies, including the Department of Defense.
Microsoft’s demand for information is one of Khan’s parting shots as she steps down after leading one of the most aggressive pushbacks against the consolidated corporate power the agency has wielded in decades. While business leaders are hoping President-elect Donald Trump will usher in an era of lighter regulation, it will fall to his new FTC chair — still unnamed — to decide how to proceed with the case.
The FTC investigation renewed its investigation of Microsoft more than 25 years after the government sued the company for similar practices bundling its Windows operating system and browser and tried unsuccessfully to crack it.
A key focus of the current investigation is Microsoft’s bundling of both its popular office productivity and security software with its cloud offerings, according to people familiar with the information request.
Microsoft’s cybersecurity failures, along with its heavy volume as a government contractor, are seen by the FTC as an example of the company’s problematic power over the market, those people said.
In a November 2023 report, the FTC highlighted concerns that the concentrated nature of the cloud market means that “outages, or other issues that reduce a cloud provider’s service, could have a large impact on the economy or specific sectors.” .”
The CrowdStrike crash that affected millions of devices running Microsoft Windows systems earlier this year was itself a testament to the widespread use of the company’s products and how it directly affects the global economy.
Part of the investigation focuses on the company’s practices related to security software called Microsoft Entra ID — formerly known as Azure Active Directory — that helps authenticate users logging into cloud-based software, some say. People said
Competitors have complained that Microsoft’s licensing terms and bundling of software with cloud services make it difficult for anti-authentication and cybersecurity companies to compete.
Companies like Salesforce Inc. Slack and zoom Communications Inc. have said that Microsoft’s practice of giving away its Teams video-conferencing software for free in a bundle with popular software products like Word and Excel is anticompetitive and makes it difficult for them to compete.
