Google's $500 Million Effort To Wreck Microsoft EU Cloud Deal Failed, Report Says

Ashley Belanger reports via Ars Technica: Google tried to derail a Microsoft antitrust settlement over anticompetitive software licensing in the European Union by offering a $500 million alternative deal to the group of cloud providers behind the EU complaint, Bloomberg reported. According to Bloomberg, Google's offer to the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) required that the group maintain its EU antitrust complaint. It came "just days" before CISPE settled with Microsoft, and it was apparently not compelling enough to stop CISPE from inking a deal with the software giant that TechCrunch noted forced CISPE to accept several compromises.

Bloomberg uncovered Google's attempted counteroffer after reviewing confidential documents and speaking to "people familiar with the matter." Apparently, Google sought to sway CISPE with a package worth nearly $500 million for more than five years of software licenses and about $15 million in cash. But CISPE did not take the bait, announcing last week that an agreement was reached with Microsoft, seemingly frustrating Google. CISPE initially raised its complaint in 2022, alleging that Microsoft was "irreparably damaging the European cloud ecosystem and depriving European customers of choice in their cloud deployments" by spiking costs to run Microsoft's software on rival cloud services. In February, CISPE said that "any remedies and resolution must apply across the sector and to be accessible to all cloud customers in Europe." They also promised that "any agreements will be made public."

But the settlement reached last week excluded major rivals, including Amazon, which is a CISPE member, and Google, which is not. And despite CISPE's promise, the terms of the deal were not published, apart from a CISPE blog roughly outlining central features that it claimed resolved the group's concerns over Microsoft's allegedly anticompetitive behaviors. What is clear is that CISPE agreed to drop their complaint by taking the deal, but no one knows exactly how much Microsoft paid in a "lump sum" to cover CISPE legal fees for three years, TechCrunch noted. However, "two people with direct knowledge of the matter" told Reuters that Microsoft offered about $22 million.

Switching to a different O/S is hard

[Cassini2]

I know a company that makes real-time control software. The front-end is MFC-based. The future is to switch the application to Linux, merge the expensive real-time platform with the Windows platform, and to simplify the software stack. It would make the product much simpler, faster, easier to sell, generally better.

They aren't switching ...

The difficulties with switching a windows application to Linux are so immense that it kills the idea ... And this is for one real-time system that needs only one co

Re:

[Owy]

Real-time in Windows or Linux?

not surprised.

[bloodhawk]

not surprised. Google leads in many things, Cloud infrastructure is NOT one of them. They are the red headed stepchild of the cloud and would require a lot more than that to get people to use their subpar offerings.

Who can be the most "destructive" tech giant

[Owy]

Google bribing organizations? Hard to believe a former "do no evil" company is doing it. Besides, it's hard to put the $ sign in Google, it is much easier for Micro$oft... Of course, if it were Microsoft, everyone would be crying out loud about how destructive they are. But when it comes to Google, it's like they're both playing the same game...maybe even worse in Google's case, considering that, since Satya Nadella's the top boss at Microsoft they reduced the amount of obvious evilness. Anyway, it's like

Real Capitalism in Action

[Required Snark]

All that hot air about "innovation" and "efficiency" and "market forces" is a pack of lies. Real capitalism is about entrenched players leveraging their economic and political power to steal as much as they can while doing as little as they can get away with. The only competition is between corrupt cartels over who gets to take the most money from the suckers who have no choice except to pay through the nose.

Capitalism is just a polite name for state sanctioned organized crime.

Microsoft SCO tactics.

[Njovich]

They openly are trying to bribe a group of companies to pursue legal challenges against a competitor. Really classy trying to use the court system as a weapon in a legal dispute that's effectively already settles in a satisfactory manner.

Microsoft used to do this with SCO and it mostly just backfired.

I'm sure Google's laywers managed to keep everything within the lines of legality, but I hope they get slammed for this eventually. The court system should be about rule of law, not the personal tool for billionaires to wage their battles.

Azure hid security flaws to win gov contracts

[clay_buster]

Microsoft's handling and burying of their knowledge of the Solarwinds attack vector while bidding on government contracts should be grounds for disqualification. There should be major penalties at the very least.

https://www.propublica.org/art... [propublica.org]