Nextcloud has decided to drop the lawsuit against Microsoft.
The German company has chosen to abandon the action. It regrets the lack of “notable progress” since it was brought to the European Commission in 2021.
The complaint had accused the American group of using Windows to tilt the playing field in favor of its own services, starting with OneDrive and Teams. Nextcloud still laments this. It also adds, among other things, the difficulty of using the OS without creating a Microsoft account.
Around thirty organizations had formally backed the initiative. Among them on the French side:
- Abilian
- Aqua Ray
- Arawa
- Cozy Cloud
- Jamespot
- Linagora
- Netframe
- Nexedi
- Rapid.Space
- Talkspirit
- TAS Cloud Services
- Whaller
- Wimi
- XWiki
Microsoft Under Heightened Scrutiny in Germany
Nextcloud filed a parallel complaint with the German competition authority. It has enjoyed more success on that front. In September 2024, Microsoft was placed for five years under a special monitoring regime. The basic rationale: its products are ubiquitous in businesses and households and have become indispensable.
Alphabet, Meta, Amazon and Apple were placed under the same regime. For the last two, the decision was confirmed by the German judiciary.
Investigations were opened accordingly. For example, into Amazon’s exclusive distribution agreements with brands. Or into Meta’s cross-linking of data collected across its various services.
For OVHcloud, the Outcome Was More Favorable
In 2021, Brussels filed another complaint against Microsoft, accusing the company of erecting barriers to the operation of its software on competing clouds. It came from OVHcloud. The Italian Aruba and the Danish Cloud Community were also involved.
This complaint was officially withdrawn in July 2024. Microsoft had then reached an agreement with an organization of which OVHcloud is a member: CISPE (Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe). CISPE had itself challenged the American group before the European Commission, in November 2022.
The agreement in question was meant to translate, among other things, into the development of an edition of Azure Stack HCI – renamed Azure Local – specifically for European CSPs. That technical solution ultimately did not come to fruition. A contractual compromise was reached instead. It materializes notably through usage-based licensing models for Windows Server and SQL Server, with pricing “comparable to that of Azure.” CISPE also secured that its members could deploy Microsoft 365 Local on their infrastructures, in a single-tenant configuration. Another advance: hosting of workloads billed on a usage basis via Azure Arc no longer requires sharing customer data. And free ESUs are provided for single-tenant Azure Local deployments, such as Windows 10/11 multisession VDI, also single-tenant.
