Earlier this week, Microsoft Deputy General CVP Rima Alaily penned a post to the company’s Microsoft on the Issues blog which calls out Google’s ongoing shadow campaign to undermine the company’s cloud operations in the eyes of regulators.
Two years ago, a group of cloud services providers in the European Union got together to file a complaint with the EU Commission regarding potential anticompetitive behavior by Microsoft regarding its cloud services and platforms. The group filing the complaint with the EU Commission was known as the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) and they spent the last two years working with European regulators to craft formal charges of antitrust if Microsoft didn’t provide market equivalent concessions for its Azure cloud services or platforms.
Microsoft narrowly avoided an official charge of anti-competitiveness by providing the members of the CISPE a combination of money and credits to its customers to recoup revenue lost from its Azure licensing practices.
However, Alaily claims Google offered the members of CISPE up to $500 million to reject Microsoft’s concessions to get the EU Commission to file official charges of antitrust. Fortunately, for Microsoft, the members of the CISPE declined Google’s offer and accepted the proposed resolutions, thus closing their investigation.
In the two years the EU and the CISPE spent digging into Microsoft’s cloud licensing practices, Google also filed its own complaint with the EU Commission but appeared to be looking for the CISPE’s investigation to set a precedent for its own claims. When CISPE opted to endorse Microsoft’s concessions, Google tried to undermine the deal with its own.
Now Alaily claims Google is back at it again with a new masked effort to similarly back an investigation through proxies.
This week an astroturf group organized by Google is launching. It is designed to discredit Microsoft with competition authorities, and policymakers and mislead the public. Google has gone to great lengths to obfuscate its involvement, funding, and control, most notably by recruiting a handful of European cloud providers, to serve as the public face of the new organization. When the group launches, Google, we understand, will likely present itself as a backseat member rather than its leader. It remains to be seen what Google offered smaller companies to join, either in terms of cash or discounts.
Rima Alaily – CVP, Deputy General Counsel
Alaily believes that Google efforts are motivated by more than a thinly veiled concern of anti-competitiveness in the cloud market. Instead, Alaily points to over twenty-four antitrust investigations aimed at Google regarding its businesses in search, advertisement, and exclusive partner deals for its various operating systems as evidence of the company looking to obfuscate its own practices, and “turning its vast resources towards tearing down others.”
As for the details of Google’s latest astroturfing efforts, Alaily explains that the company is backing another lobbying organization with explicit intent to attack Microsoft’s cloud computing business in the EU yet again, while also expanding work into the United Kingdom as well.
Baseless claims are ripe for liability lawsuits, but Alaily does provide a link to a recruitment document that follows the very thread she lays out, sans Google’s name or the direct purpose of the new lobbying group. Alaily corroborates her claims following a conversation with a small cloud service provider who was approached to join the new lobbying group shortly after Google’s $500 million counteroffer was rejected by the CISPE in July 2024.
In a two-pronged assault, Alaily claims Google is attempting to use its third-place status in the cloud market as a leveraging point to avoid hyperscale restrictions while lobbying to apply those same regulations to its competitors. Because it was late to the cloud services industry, Google is looking to label itself as a non-hyperscale or small cloud provider which makes it exempt from restrictions the larger Amazon and Microsoft cloud should have imposed on them, according to Alaily.
Alaily points to other examples of Google’s experience in astroturfing including an effort in North America spearheaded by the U.S. based Coalition for Fair Software Licensing. The CFSL has gone after Microsoft in the EU, UK, and United States.
Defending itself, a Google spokesperson respond to journalist Paul Thurrott when asked about Alaily claims by reiterating the company’s concerns regarding Microsoft’s anticompetitive practices of lock-in.
“We’ve been very public about our concerns with Microsoft’s cloud licensing. We and many others believe that Microsoft’s anticompetitive practices lock-in customers and create negative downstream effects that impact cybersecurity, innovation, and choice. You can read more in our many blog posts on these issues.”
Google spokesperson
To be fair, Microsoft was also known to cast its own fear, uncertaintity, and doubt (FUD) when it came to Google’s push into enterprise mail services with its cringy Gmail-man campaigns. While Microsoft’s efforts weren’t as cloak and dagger as Google’s current and alleged astroturf campaigns are, it amounted to roughly the same outcome of attempts to undermine competition.
With Microsoft hip to Google’s new attempts, it’ll be interesting to see how it navigates anticompetitive allegations, inquiries and investigations regarding its cloud services and platforms going forward.
