US Regulators Plan To Investigate Microsoft's Cloud Business (ft.com)
(Thursday November 14, 2024 @05:40PM (msmash)
from the up-next dept.)
- Reference: 0175472999
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/14/2024223/us-regulators-plan-to-investigate-microsofts-cloud-business
- Source link: https://www.ft.com/content/62f361eb-ce52-47c1-9857-878cfe298d54
The Federal Trade Commission is preparing to launch an investigation into anti-competitive practices at Microsoft's cloud computing business, Financial Times reported Thursday, as the US regulator continues to pursue Big Tech in the final weeks of Joe Biden's presidency. From the report:
> The FTC is examining allegations that Microsoft is abusing its market power in productivity software by imposing punitive licensing terms to [1]prevent customers from moving their data from its Azure cloud service to competitors' platforms, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
>
> Tactics being examined include substantially increasing subscription fees for those that leave, charging steep exit fees and allegedly making its Office 365 products incompatible with rival clouds, they added.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/62f361eb-ce52-47c1-9857-878cfe298d54
> The FTC is examining allegations that Microsoft is abusing its market power in productivity software by imposing punitive licensing terms to [1]prevent customers from moving their data from its Azure cloud service to competitors' platforms, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
>
> Tactics being examined include substantially increasing subscription fees for those that leave, charging steep exit fees and allegedly making its Office 365 products incompatible with rival clouds, they added.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/62f361eb-ce52-47c1-9857-878cfe298d54
BillG backed the wrong horse (Score:2)
by BuckBundy ( 781446 )
Ooops, the Emperor strikes back
Re: (Score:1)
by KlomDark ( 6370 )
Someone sounds triggered. You want to live in a monopoly-only society? Go do that shit somewhere else.
Re: (Score:1)
> increasing desktop licensing fees to push desktop users to the cloud.
This isn't directly an antitrust issue, just a slimy business practice since MS doesn't have to offer any desktop software. Since MS is still the de-facto business platform standard, there are not a lot of viable desktop alternatives, however, so it's on the fuzzy borderline of antitrust.
Let's just get together and [1]form an HTTP-friendly state-ful GUI standard [slashdot.org] so we can run ever more software on Linux and tell MS to finally shove Windows u
[1] https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23519273&pid=64943397#64946197
Re: (Score:2)
MariaDB? Are you kidding? Maybe for some little/middling site. But other than that, yuck. From all the ones I've used my preference is: 1. MS SQL (Error messages that make sense?! No way!) 2. Oracle (Absolutely horrid error messages that make next to no sense, if you're lucky) 3. Postgres (Only for small/medium) ... 7. MariaDB 8. My SQL