Report from Reuters
In Brief – The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the country’s antitrust regulator, has announced that it will investigate Microsoft’s dominance in business software using its powers to oversee big tech. The CMA is opening a “strategic market status” investigation, its fourth based on powers granted last year under the Digital Markets Competition and Consumers Act (DMCC), to examine whether Microsoft’s bundling of Windows, Word, Excel, Teams, Copilot and other products, including the company’s cloud services infrastructure, was anticompetitive. CMA Chief Executive Sarah Cardell said business software was a cornerstone of the British economy, with hundreds of thousands of customers relying on Microsoft’s systems. A Microsoft spokesperson said the US company was “committed to working quickly and constructively with the CMA to facilitate its review of the business software market”.
Context – The DMCC is essentially the UK version of the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA). There are operational differences, and the EU has had a couple of years head start. The DMA sets out 18 high-level competition policy-inspired mandates that currently apply to 23 “core platform services” operated by seven “gatekeeper” companies with specific requirements created on the go via company-by-company investigations. The DMCC has the CMA designate that a digital giant has SMS status in a market. Google Search was the first, followed by the Apple and Google mobile ecosystems. The CMA also undertook an SMS investigation of the Amazon and Microsoft cloud businesses and announced in March that both companies had committed to reduce cloud egress fees and expand cloud interoperability to support greater choice for businesses and public sector organizations in the UK. The CMA announced that it would close that SMS investigation following those commitments and would move to a review of Microsoft’s broader business software practices. The software giant’s policies of bundling and tying its various software services and apps, including its cloud services, are also being investigated by antitrust regulators in EU and US.