Alfaview, a German tech company known for its videoconferencing app, has made an antitrust complaint against Microsoft over its decision to bundle its own videoconferencing project with Office.
The complaint adds to an existing one from Salesforce-owned Slack, adding to scrutiny of the tech giant.
Via Reuters:
The U.S. software company has been on the EU competition enforcer’s radar since 2020, when Salesforce-owned (CRM.N) workspace messaging app Slack complained about the tying of Teams with Office.
Alfaview, based in Karlsruhe in south-western Germany and with a 500-strong workforce, said it had filed a similar complaint to the European Commission.
Bundling both products together gives Teams a unique competitive advantage that is not justified by performance and which rivals cannot match, it said.
Once seen as behind the times compared to rivals like Apple, Google, and Facebook, attention towards Microsoft has surged over the past year thanks to its multi-billion dollar backing of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The tech company is now widely perceived to be at the cutting edge of consumer AI, although the market is changing rapidly.
With more attention comes more scrutiny, however, and Microsoft has faced heavy antitrust fines in the past, including the landmark United States vs. Microsoft case in 2001. In the past decade alone, Microsoft has been fined over $2.5 billion by the European commission for breaching EU competition rules.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election. Follow him on Twitter @AllumBokhari.