Germany to Enforce DMA Regulations for All Microsoft Products and Services

Puff

Veteran
10 Jan 2023
1,502
3,660
"Germany's antitrust authority [has] concluded a 6-month investigation of Microsoft and determined that the entire company should be held to the standards of the European Union's Digital Market Act (DMA) regulations, not just Windows and LinkedIn."
“Our decision applies to Microsoft as a whole, not only to individual services or products,” BKartA president Andreas Mundt explains. “At the same time, Microsoft is subject to the EU provisions applicable to gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act. However, at this stage the resulting rules, which are enforced by the EU Commission, only apply to the Windows operating system and the LinkedIn network. Based on our decision, we can stop anti-competitive practices which are not covered by the DMA.”
This is a sweeping expansion of what was already one of the planet’s strictest antitrust enforcement actions. It’s based on new regulatory powers that Germany introduced in 2021 that require the BKartA to investigate whether large and powerful companies are of “paramount significance across markets,” meaning they have the ability to prevent other companies from contesting their market power effectively. The regulatory body announced its investigation of Microsoft in March 2024, noting how it expanded the market power established by Windows and Office by expanding into new markets for video conferencing and collaboration (Teams), video games (Xbox), career networks (LinkedIn), and Internet Search (Bing), and is now seeking to do the same with AI.

Its conclusions were obvious enough: Microsoft owns a “comprehensive cross-market portfolio of products, particularly for business customers, which are interconnected in many ways.” It has “continuously increased its portfolio through acquisitions, its own developments and by adding new functionalities to its established core products.” As such, “it has a significant advantage over competitors that are only active on individual submarkets” and have trouble interconnecting with the products in Microsoft’s ecosystem.

The BKartA will now monitor Microsoft’s activities for five years, but it has yet to decide whether any specific activities warrant possible proceedings. It will publish a more detailed report discussing the investigation soon.
 
20 Jun 2022
1,021
1,472
38
Salalah, Oman
Happy Way To Go GIF by Lifetime


Keep on pressuring these freaks.
 
24 Jun 2022
3,980
6,950
The regulatory body announced its investigation of Microsoft in March 2024, noting how it expanded the market power established by Windows and Office by expanding into new markets for video conferencing and collaboration (Teams), video games (Xbox), career networks (LinkedIn), and Internet Search (Bing), and is now seeking to do the same with AI.

Glad a major regulator finally pointed this out. MS gained A LOT from the Wintel days of the '80s and '90s that helped pave their way into new markets afterwards.

The fact regulators basically ignored this when MS were trying to acquire ABK is actually crazy to me. It wasn't even Xbox's money or value that made that acquisition possible! And I'm not saying big companies shouldn't be able to leverage money & resources of other divisions to bolster smaller divisions; Sony did the same thing to help get PlayStation going, for example.

But companies like NEC, Matsushita etc., you know other HUGE electronics companies during the '80s and '90s? When their consoles failed they closed shop and exited the market as platform holders. If the PlayStation failed, Sony would've done the exact same thing. But Western megaconglomerates like Microsoft (and for another market example, Netflix with film/tv streaming) will literally eat loss after loss after loss in one market just to outlast competitors and whittle them away (including doing other things like predatory pricing) until there's simply no alternative left. OR they acquire potential competitors until no competitors are around.

And to do that they leverage the power of their much more successful divisions, some built off of what were monopolistic practices during their heyday but not treated seriously as such because they were emerging markets at the time or too new to use precedent against.