The UK competition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, is opening an investigation into Microsoft’s business software unit, trying to stop the Windows maker from squashing new AI-era rivals.
The CMA said it would assess whether the US tech giant should be given “strategic market status” and dragged into the same regime used for Google Search and the Fruity Cargo Cult Apple and Google’s mobile app stores.
Vole rivals Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud have long whined that it charges more to run software such as Windows on its own cloud than Azure does.
The regulator is worried that Windows and Microsoft’s Office suite, including Teams and its Copilot assistant, could make life nasty for newer entrants to the business software market.
That concern lands as AI tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and Google’s Gemini grow quickly and start nibbling at the cosy enterprise stack.
Despite an independent CMA panel report last summer saying the UK cloud market was “not working well”, the agency’s board stopped short of new conduct rules for Azure or AWS.
That was widely expected to get tougher, but the board blinked, at least for now.
The CMA said Microsoft and AWS had committed to making it easier and cheaper for customers to switch cloud providers.
It said they would enable data to move more freely between their services and smaller rivals such as Google, rather than trapping firms in a costly one-way door.
The regulator said it would monitor cloud interoperability and review the market again in six months to determine whether it needs to take stronger action.
CMA, chief executive Sarah Cardell, said: “We’re using the regime in a flexible, pragmatic way to deliver real impact, as quickly as possible, for UK customers,” and added: “This announcement shows we’re not just responding to today’s concerns but getting ahead of emerging issues too.”
Microsoft President Brad Smith said AI was changing the market “at an unprecedented pace”.
He added: “We are committed to working quickly and constructively to address these issues, including by providing all the information the CMA needs to move forward with its reviews.”
Amazon vice-president and associate general counsel Andrew DeVore said AWS would give UK customers new rights to use multiple cloud services simultaneously, as well as better data portability and switching.
DeVore said: “Through ongoing engagement with the CMA and UK customers, we’ll continue to deliver the tools, services, and flexibility that UK businesses are using to thrive.”
