Microsoft receives a large-scale antitrust investigation by the US FTC

The US Federal Trade Commission has launched an antitrust investigation into Microsoft Corp.

The US Federal Trade Commission plans to examine everything from cloud computing and software licensing to cybersecurity and artificial intelligence products, the publication writes.

After more than a year of conducting informal interviews with competitors and business partners, the antitrust authorities have drawn up a detailed request to force Microsoft to hand over information. The demand, which consists of hundreds of pages, was sent to the company after it was signed by FTC Chairman Lina Khan, a source told Bloomberg.

FTC antitrust lawyers intend to meet with Microsoft' s competitors next week to gather more information about the Redmond, Washington-based company's business practices, according to two other people familiar with the plans, who, like the others, asked not to be identified because of the confidential nature of the matter.

The Federal Trade Commission's scrutiny of Microsoft's cloud computing has gained momentum following a series of cybersecurity incidents involving the company's products.

The FTC's investigation renews scrutiny of Microsoft 's business practices more than 25 years after the government sued the company for similar behavior related to the merger of its Windows operating system and browser and tried to break it up to no avail.

According to people familiar with the information request, the main focus of the current investigation is Microsoft's bundling of both its popular office and security software with its cloud offerings.

According to these people, the FTC sees Microsoft's cybersecurity shortcomings, combined with its power as a government contractor, as an example of the company's problematic market power.

In a November 2023 report, the Federal Trade Commission expressed concern that the concentrated nature of the cloud market means that "outages or other problems that degrade the quality of a cloud provider's services could have a cascading effect on the economy or certain sectors."

The CrowdStrike outage, which affected millions of devices running Microsoft Windows systems earlier this year, was itself a testament to the widespread use of the company's products and how this directly affects the global economy.

Part of the investigation focuses on the company's practices related to Microsoft's Entra ID security software - formerly known as Azure Active Directory - which helps authenticate users logging into cloud-based software.

Ігор Льов