The Competition and Markets Authority found that consumers have overpaid roughly £1 billion in veterinary fees over five years, highlighting a significant issue in the market.
That behaviour concerns its widely criticised practice of charging customers more for wanting to run and host its software (namely Windows Server) in competing cloud environments. It is claimed the tactic can make it cost-prohibitive for enterprise cloud users to run Microsoft's software anywhere but on the software giant's own public cloud platform Azure, which could potentially give it an unfair advantage when it comes to building its share of the cloud infrastructure market.
The case in the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) centers on the cost - sometimes as much as four times as high - of running Windows Server on Google, AWS, or Alibaba clouds. Filed in December 2024, the case is being spearheaded by digital markets regulation expert Dr Maria Luisa Stasi. It was given added impetus by the Competition and Markets Authority's (CMA) final findings in July that Microsoft's licensing policies disadvantaged customers using its three main rivals.
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