Microsoft has mostly managed to stay in the good books of the EU’s competition regulators since the late aughts, when it received a record $1.3 billion fine in 2008 for failing to properly comply with an earlier antitrust decision about interoperability, and settled another major antitrust investigation in 2009 by giving Windows users a choice of default browser when they fired up the operating system.
However, Microsoft’s cultural transformation into a supposedly less aggressive entity has recently been called into question. The company has started ignoring Outlook and Teams users’ browser choices by opening links in its Edge browser. It might soon face a British antitrust probe over contractual terms that arguably lock customers into its cloud (rival Amazon is also in those crosshairs). And now it’s under investigation by the EU antitrust directorate again.
