NEXTCLOUD EU EUROPEAN COMMISSION MICROSOFT TEAMS SOFTWARE

NEXTCLOUD EU EUROPEAN COMMISSION MICROSOFT TEAMS SOFTWARE

Nextcloud is joined by other competitive bodies looking to leverage the EU’s more stringent consumer protection laws such as Slack, European DIGITAL SME Alliance, LibreOffice’s Document Foundation and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) as well as support from Albilian open-source publishing, DAASI and Malifence.

Together with the other members of the coalition, we are asking the antitrust authorities in Europe to enforce a level playing field, giving customers a free choice and giving the competition a fair chance. This kind of behavior is bad for the consumer, for the market, and, of course, for local businesses in the EU. Copy an innovators’ product, bundle it with your own dominant product, and kill their business, then stop innovating.

This is quite similar to what Microsoft did when it killed the competition in the browser market, stopping nearly all browser innovations for over a decade. Vaughan-Nichols writes that Nextcloud believes Microsoft has flagrantly blocked 3rd party cloud service providers from a fair competitive field by leveraging its own services over others, which has led to Microsoft subsequently increasing its EU market share to 66% while local providers have dropped from 26 percent to 16 percent over the same time period.Īdmittedly, what Microsoft is doing with its preferential treatment of OneDrive isn’t technically an abuse of EU competition laws, Nextcloud CEO and founder Frank Karlitschek would like to use historical rhetoric to invoke action. Similar to other bundling efforts by hardware and service providers, Microsoft is being called out for its perceived attempts at “limiting consumer choice,” by pairing Windows with its own first party cloud service.

Nextcloud eu european commission microsoft teams