Google says Microsoft is illegally using its dominant Windows Server enterprise server software licenses to force customers to rely on it for cloud computing.
The long-standing feud between Google and Microsoft is once again becoming public knowledge.
The latest blow from Google came in a complaint filed with the European Commission on Wednesday accusing Microsoft of violating European Union antitrust laws.
In a document cited by Yahoo Finance, Google says Microsoft is illegally using its dominant licenses for enterprise server software “Windows Server” to force customers to stick with it for cloud computing.
Microsoft, for its part, predicted that Google would “fail” in its attempt, saying it had already settled similar concerns raised by European cloud service providers.
“Having failed to convince European companies, we expect that Google will similarly fail to convince the European Commission,” commented a Microsoft spokesperson.
“The new dispute shows that this is a cold war that’s heating up,” Adam Kovacevich, CEO and founder of the tech policy advocacy group Chamber of Progress, told YF.
Scruples
The two tech giants have spent the past two decades battling for supremacy in technologies ranging from online search and cloud computing to operating systems, software, online advertising — and now artificial intelligence.
The feud began after Microsoft settled a landmark antitrust case in the US, alleging it squeezed out rivals by making its browser free and the default on the dominant Windows operating system.
A 2002 settlement opened the door to more competition in the browser software market and enabled Google, then a startup founded by Stanford students Sergey Brin and Larry Page, to begin its explosive growth in the 2000s.
Microsoft defended its reclaimed territory in a series of videos first released in 2011 in which it satirized Google by spoofing that rival Gmail, the Chrome browser and accompanying software lacked privacy protections.
A video titled “Gmail Man” questions Google’s ethics, accusing it of extracting every word of Gmail customers’ personal emails to target them with advertisements.
In other videos titled “Scroogled” and “Googlighting” — a parody of the 1980s TV series “Moonlighting” — Microsoft questions whether users should trust Google with their personal information.
In 2016, the companies reached a truce with an agreement to end regulatory complaints against each other globally as two new CEOs — Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella — took over.
The pact ended in 2021 as regulators in the US and EU stepped up pressure on the two companies, and Microsoft complained that Google was using unfair tactics to compete in online search and advertising.
“Brush your teeth and google”
Things really got particularly awkward last year during the high-profile antitrust lawsuit that pitted Google against the US Department of Justice. It was a case that alleged that Google had illegally monopolized the online search engine market. This echoed the Justice Department’s sentiment against Microsoft in the 1990s.
The most prominent witness to testify against Google was Nadella, who didn’t hesitate to take a jab at his rival while on the stand.
“You get up in the morning, brush your teeth, and search Google,” Nadella said, underscoring the company’s overwhelming dominance of the search engine market.
Nadella said Microsoft’s own search engine, Bing, has failed to gain traction because Google negotiated its own default spot in browsers, desktops and mobile devices.
Nadella then described the imbalance as a “vicious cycle” that he said would intensify with the development of artificial intelligence. Google lost the case with a judge ruling that its search business was an illegal monopoly. The decision is now pending a legal defense phase that could lead to the collapse of the empire.
“Microsoft was probably the main instigator of the antitrust lawsuit against Google,” Kovacevich says. “And the conviction against Google will likely benefit Microsoft’s Bing the most.”
Microsoft is taking a similar approach in another antitrust case against Google, which is still in its early trial stages. In it, she argued that Google’s control over online advertising technology hurt Bing’s success.
