Nextcloud and other companies denounce Microsoft for anti-competitive practices.

Nextcloud, the commercial arm of the collaborative solution in the open source cloud, together with thirty other companies, has just presented a complaint against Microsoft for anticompetitive practices before the European Commission. It is due to the integration of Windows 10 and 11 with the OneDrive cloud storage service and the Teams communication solution.

Nextcloud and other companies denounce Microsoft

The so-called "Coalition for a Level Playing Field" made up of 31 companies developing software and solutions in the cloud, affirms that By pressuring consumers to register and submit their data to Microsoft, the company limits consumers' choices and creates an unfair barrier for other companies offering competing services to embedded ones.

According to the coalition, this is the reason that Microsoft has increased its market share on the European continent to 66%, while the share of local providers decreased from 26% to 16%. According to them, Microsoft did not achieve this because of any technical advantage or sales strategy.. It's all the result of prioritizing your own products over your competitors'. While self-promotion is not illegal under EU competition laws, abuse of dominance is.

From Nextcloud they go further, since they affirm that Microsoft directly blocked other cloud service providers by leveraging its position as a Windows developer to extend its reach into complementary markets, pushing users to use their products more and more. This makes it impossible for European Union companies, no matter how much their products are better, since the secret lies in the ability to prevent access to the consumer.

statements

Nextcloud founder Frank Karlitschek recalled:

This is quite similar to what Microsoft did when it killed the competition in the browser market., halting almost all innovations in this type of software for more than a decade. Copy an innovator's product, combine it with your own dominant product, and kill your business, then stop innovating. This kind of behavior is bad for the consumer, for the market and, of course, for local businesses in the European Union. Together with the other members of the coalition, we are calling on the antitrust authorities in Europe to impose a level playing field, giving customers the freedom to choose and giving the competition a fair chance.

Nextcloud isn't the only open source organization tied to demand. She is accompanied by several nonprofit open source support organizations. Among them the European DIGITAL SME Alliance; the Document Foundation (the entity behind LibreOffice) and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).

Lothar Becker, President of the Document Foundation, said:

European citizens should be able to decide for themselves on the digital tools they use to create, store and share content, including an open document format for your files. The actions of big technology, based on the power of their monopoly in the area of ​​the operating system, force consumers to use proprietary software, thus reducing their freedom and digital rights. We support the complaint about this anti-competitive behavior and urge the EU to take immediate action.

Who spoke for the Free Software Foundation Europe (Nothing to do with Stallman's) was Heiki Lõhmus, its vice president:

Integrated 'software as a service' offerings seriously threaten the freedom of European computer users and their ability to maintain effective control over their devices and data … We will continue to support them (the lawsuits) to ensure that markets remain fair and that embedded competitors do not engage in illegal anti-competitive efforts to crack down on competitors that empower their users.

I loved the statements of Stefane Fermigier, founder of an open source solutions company for business information management:

I doubt Microsoft's leopard has changed his spots, no matter how much he says now that he loves Linux.
The 90s returned and they see that nothing has changed. Microsoft's anti-competitive practices remain a major concern for the competitiveness of the European cloud and software industry. As it has done in the past in similar cases, the European Commission must put an end to these practices'.

The lawsuit requires that Microsoft must support open standards and interoperability. This would give European consumers the freedom to choose between service offerings that should compete fairly on the basis of their merits.