Microsoft Corp avoided a hefty antitrust penalty after the European Union accepted its commitments to settle a probe into the alleged illegal bundling of its Teams video-conferencing app.
Microsoft’s promise to carve out Teams from its hugely popular Office packages allayed competition concerns, EU regulators said in a statement Friday. The move comes after rivals and customers raised no serious objections in a market test.
The decision is likely to hand some respite in fraught EU-US relations following President Donald Trump’s recent attacks on Brussels’ crackdown on Silicon Valley. The EU fined Alphabet Inc.’s Google almost €3 billion ($3.5 billion) last week as it ordered the search giant to stop favoring its own advertising technology services — sparking an immediate response from Trump.
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The European Commission had previously warned Microsoft that its abuse of market power since 2019 gave Teams an unfair advantage over rivals.
Under the settlement reported by Bloomberg earlier, Microsoft will agree to sell Teams separately from its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 packages. The commitments include an obligation for Microsoft to charge less for packages without Teams and to improve interoperability for rival software using Microsoft services.
“We appreciate the dialogue with the commission that led to this agreement, and we turn now to implementing these new obligations promptly and fully,” said Nanna-Louise Linde, Microsoft’s vice president of European government affairs.
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The EU’s case followed a complaint from messaging platform Slack in 2019. Slack was acquired by Salesforce Inc., a provider of cloud-based customer management software, in a $27.7 billion deal in 2021.
Despite the recent Google fine, the Brussels-based commission is increasingly keen on brokering agreements with companies to avoid legal battles over alleged anti-competitive conduct.
In other probes into alleged abuse of dominance, Apple Inc. signed an agreement to open up its mobile wallet technology to rivals while Amazon.com Inc. revamped its marketplace “Buy Box” and agreed to stop using non-public data.
