The European Commission on Thursday launched an antitrust probe into whether Microsoft’s bundling of its Teams business chat app as part of its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 software packages is a breach of European Union competition laws.
Citing how remote communication and collaboration tools like Teams have become “indispensable for many businesses in Europe” amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the arrival of new players to meet demand for cloud-based messaging, video meetings and file sharing the commission said it was concerned Microsoft may be abusing its dominant market position to limit competition in the European Economic Area.
“In particular, the Commission is concerned that Microsoft may grant Teams a distribution advantage by not giving customers the choice on whether or not to include access to that product when they subscribe to their productivity suites and may have limited the interoperability between its productivity suites and competing offerings,” the commission said.
The probe stems from a July 2020 complaint lodged by rival Slack Technologies alleging that Microsoft was illegally tying Teams to its market-dominant business productivity suites.
EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said it opened the probe to ensure the markets for products like Slack “remain competitive” and that companies “are free to choose the products that best meet their needs.”
Microsoft responded by saying it would cooperate with the probe and work to resolve issues flagged up.
“We respect the European Commission’s work on this case and take our own responsibilities very seriously. We will continue to cooperate with the Commission and remain committed to finding solutions that will address its concerns,” said a spokesman.
The commission stressed that it would conduct an in-depth investigation in a timely fashion and that Microsoft was innocent until proven guilty, but that if the case was proven, it may breach rules contained in the Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union that prohibit the abuse of a dominant position.
The probe relieves individual competition authorities in the 27-member-country bloc of their legal duty to enforce competition rules against the practices being investigated and bans national courts from making rulings that may conflict with decisions being considered by the commission.
There was no legal time limit for an antitrust investigation, the commission said, with the duration depending on a number of factors including the complexity of the case, the extent to which the companies concerned cooperate with the commission and how they exercise their right to defend themselves. (UPI)