The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has opened a broad antitrust investigation into Microsoft Corp, including its software licensing and cloud computing businesses, a source familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.
The probe was approved by FTC Chair Lina Khan ahead of her likely departure in January.
The re-election of US president-elect Donald Trump, and the expectation he would appoint a fellow Republican with a softer approach toward business, leaves the outcome of the investigation up in the air.
Photo: Reuters
The FTC is examining allegations 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 said earlier this month.
The FTC is also looking at practices related to cybersecurity and artificial intelligence (AI) products, the source said on Wednesday.
Microsoft declined to comment.
Competitors have criticized Microsoft’s practices they say keep customers locked into its cloud offering, Azure. The FTC fielded such complaints last year as it examined the cloud computing market.
NetChoice, a lobbying group that represents online companies such as Amazon.com Inc and Google, criticized Microsoft’s licensing policies and its integration of AI tools into its Office and Outlook.
“Given that Microsoft is the world’s largest software company, dominating in productivity and operating systems software, the scale and consequences of its licensing decisions are extraordinary,” the group said.
Google in September complained to the European Commission about Microsoft’s practices, saying it made customers pay a 400 percent mark-up to keep running Windows Server on rival cloud computing operators, and gave them later and more limited security updates.
The FTC has demanded a broad range of detailed information from Microsoft, Bloomberg News reported earlier on Wednesday.
The agency had already claimed jurisdiction over probes into Microsoft and OpenAI regarding competition in AI, and started looking into Microsoft’s US$650 million deal with AI start-up Inflection AI.
It is unclear whether Trump would ease up on big tech companies, whose first administration launched several probes into them.
J.D. Vance, the incoming US vice president, has expressed concern about the power the companies wield over public discourse.
Still, Microsoft has benefited from Trump’s policies in the past.
In 2019, the Pentagon awarded it a US$10 billion cloud computing contract that Amazon had widely been expected to win.
Amazon later alleged that Trump exerted improper pressure on military officials to steer the contract away from its Amazon Web Services unit.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS