From The Register
EU monopoly cops probe complaints about Microsoft Azure
By Paul Kunert
EU antitrust wagons are circling Microsoft's Azure just as a probe by the Federal Trade Commission takes shape, with software vendors' heavy-handed licensing practices in the cloud drawing fire stateside.
Microsoft is already facing complaints on multiple fronts: Slack took exception to it bundling Teams with Office 365; Nextcloud filed papers with the EU over Microsoft bundling OneDrive with Windows; and OVHcloud, DCC and Aruba S.p.a jointly complained about Redmond's restrictive software licensing in the cloud...
Steven Weber, professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information, said he thought licensing terms "tell us a lot about the ways in which people are trying to parse the difference between technical constraints and business model constraints."
"A very close comparison and an examination of licensing terms in different services across different cloud providers is almost a necessity of this investigation," he told the FTC panel.
Steven Weber is a professor emeritus of the I School, retiring in 2021. He previously served as the faculty director at the Center for Long Term Cybersecurity (CLTC).
