EU opens antitrust investigation into Microsoft

By Tuba Ongun

ANKARA (AA) - The European Commission announced Thursday that it is opening a formal antitrust investigation into Microsoft for possible breach of competition rules.

The institution will carry out an in-depth investigation on whether Microsoft’s tying or bundling of its communication and collaboration product Teams software with its Office may have breached EU competition rules

"In particular, the Commission is concerned that Microsoft may grant Teams a distribution advantage by not giving customers the choice on whether or not to include access to that product when they subscribe to their productivity suites and may have limited the interoperability between its productivity suites and competing offerings," read the statement.

In July 2020, Salesforce's Slack Technologies filed an anti-competitive complaint against Microsoft, alleging that Microsoft illegally tied Teams to its dominant productivity suites.