By Foo Yun Chee
BRUSSELS (Reuters) -Microsoft has clinched a multi-million-euro deal to settle CISPE’s antitrust complaint about its cloud computing licensing practices, the U.S. tech giant said on Wednesday, averting an EU antitrust investigation that could have led to a hefty fine.
CISPE, whose members include Amazon and a score of small EU cloud providers, filed a complaint with the European Commission in late 2022 alleging that Microsoft’s new contractual terms imposed on Oct. 1 were harming Europe’s cloud computing ecosystem.
Microsoft ranks behind market leader Amazon in the cloud computing sector but ahead of Alphabet’s Google.
“After working with CISPE and its European members for more than a year, I am pleased that we’ve not only resolved their concerns of the past, but also worked together to define a path forward that brings even more competition to the cloud computing market in Europe and beyond,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said.
Microsoft will develop a product allowing CISPE’s members to run Microsoft software on their platforms on the U.S. tech giant’s Azure cloud infrastructure with prices equivalent to Microsoft’s prices, CISPE said.
Microsoft will also compensate CISPE members for lost revenues related to their licensing costs over the last two years, the group said.
The settlement does not include Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and AliCloud. CISPE said it would withdraw its EU complaint and would not start or support complaints on these issues in Europe and elsewhere.
(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by Toby Chopra and Christina Fincher)
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