Igor Golovniov | Sopa Images | Lightrocket via Getty ImagesMicrosoft was accused Friday of abusing the dominance of its Azure cloud computing unit to squeeze a — and, in some cases, evaporate — the profit margins of rival cloud platforms in Europe. Under those rules, Microsoft required firms to purchase a Software Assurance license and "mobility rights" if they wanted to deploy their Microsoft software on hosted cloud services offered by rival providers. It also formed the basis of an investigation from the European Commission seeking to determine whether Microsoft's cloud practices are anti-competitive. But the growth of the unnamed cloud vendor's profit margins didn't match Microsoft's, and in fact the competing cloud vendor saw their margins fall from a positive mid-twenties percentage in 2018 to double-digit negative profit margins in 2023. The biggest decline in profit margins for this cloud firm occurred in 2019, the same year Microsoft changed its licensing terms to favor licensing software on Azure, the CISPE said.

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Persons: Igor Golovniov, Redmond, Brad Smith, CISPE, Frederic Jenny, Jenny Organizations: Ofcom, Microsoft, Getty, European Union, Software Assurance, Google, Italy's, Big Tech, European Commission, CNBC, Amazon, Windows, ESSEC Business School Locations: Europe, CISPE, Washington, Italy's Aruba, Paris