FTC Launches Broad Microsoft Antitrust Investigation

The FTC has opened a broad antitrust investigation into Microsoft, including of its software licensing and cloud computing business. Bloomberg first reported the news. Reuters reports: The probe was approved by FTC Chair Lina Khan ahead of her likely departure in January. The election of Donald Trump as U.S. president and the expectation he will appoint a fellow Republican with a softer approach toward business, leaves the outcome of the investigation up in the air.

The FTC is examining allegations that the software giant is potentially abusing its market power in productivity software by imposing punitive licensing terms to prevent customers from moving their data from its Azure cloud service to other competitive platforms, sources confirmed earlier this month. The FTC is also looking at practices related to cybersecurity and artificial intelligence products, the source said on Wednesday.

Cool!

[Sebby]

Now do Broadcom
Now do Oracle
....

The party of corporate profits

[OrangeTide]

Now get it all done before January 20 when the new administration unwinds all of this.

Re:

[ffkom]

If the current administration had actually wanted to get these monopolies broken up, they would have initiated such investigations long ago, and not just as a token gesture on their way out.

Re:

[taustin]

Precisely. They have no intention of breaking up huge companies that contribute millions to campaign coffers. This is a setup for the next election cycle:

"Look, we tried, but the Republicans shut it down (never mind we had no chance of winning to begin with)." The current administration is doing quite a lot of that sort of pro-consumer, pretend virtue signaling the last few months, both to set up the campaign contributions in the next four years, and to leave the new administration as big a mess as possible

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

> both taste like almonds

They're both nutty.

Re:

[dsgrntlxmply]

Green Kool-Aid tastes like Prestone.

Here we go again

[xack]

We will probably just have another browser choice screen again and Microsoft be required to make Edge less malware, but no real changes. The fact that you still can't go into Best Buy and get a Linux computer after all these years is proof enough. Google only forced Chromebooks through their own brute force.

Re:

[Powercntrl]

The fact that you still can't go into Best Buy and get a Linux computer after all these years is proof enough.

Technically, Android is Linux under the hood. Best Buy also sells Apple machines and mobile devices, which also aren't running Windows. The main reason you can't grab a machine off the shelf running, say, Ubuntu, is because it just wouldn't sell well to the general public, not because of anything Microsoft is doing lately.

TFS makes it seem this is mostly about Microsoft's enterprise offerings, since the consumer market is something Microsoft no longer has a stranglehold over. There's even a hugely popula

Break Them Up

[gavron]

Unbundle Internet Explorer!

That will teach them!!

Don't forget this...

[zkiwi34]

Baking bits of Hyper-V into Win11, which generally has the effect of buggering other virtualization products.