FTC to launch investigation into Microsoft’s cloud business
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Yep, these are just being done for the headlines now most likely.
Come January it's going to be a shitshow that goes after whomever Mump doesn't like (I'm coining that term for the gross musk+trump bromance. And also with mr brainworm heading up health - get ready for a return of everything like mumps that modern medicine protected)
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The timing of this release is odd. The Biden Administration is in the lame duck phase, and there's no indication the incoming Trump Administration will pursue any of this. Khan will probably be among the first to be let go from the holdovers.
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Starting means the incoming administration will be on record cancelling it, as opposed to quietly letting corporations continue the milking.
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I don't really understand the basis of the complaint here for this part.
I'm assuming the "fees" referred to here are egress charges. AFAIK, all hyperscale clouds offer free ingress and charge for egress because someone has to pay for the bandwidth. If you ban/restrict egress fees they will just recoup costs elsewhere and it's not like they hide them. It's right on the pricing page so everyone knows the deal going in. Twisting that into some sort of penalty for leaving seems a bit disingenuous.
The discounts for minimum spending I assume are a reference to savings plans/reservations. You aren't required to participate in these plans and can pay month-to-month with no minimums. A provider offering a discount for a spending commitment from a customer makes sense from a financial/capacity planning perspective and is standard across many industries. Like egress charges, this practice also common in AWS/GCP so why single out Microsoft?
The licensing stuff they might have an argument on. Microsoft licensing is arcane and convoluted on a good day and they could have easily implemented anti-competitive terms without even intending to (not saying there wasn't intent, just not hard to imagine that argument having substance).
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Based on prior history, the incoming administration will not be troubled at all by this token development. In fact, they may wear putting the kibosh on it as a badge of honor in the name of being more "business friendly."
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If the incoming administration is not worried about Microsoft's Azure business, then there isn't a huge difference, in not proceeding with a 2 month old investigation and simply not starting one.
I also find it funny that FTC is worried about Office 365 working in other cloud providers but are not worried about Google's similar offerings working in other cloud providers.
I am pretty sure I can't get Google Workspace to work within Azure. I also don't understand the focus of Azure, Microsoft is fairly completive, with both AWS and Google Cloud. Is there a potential Microsoft has an illegal monopoly other than Azure, I don't discount that possibility, but I would have to compare AWS and Google Cloud data exporting polices before I make up my mind on that subject. I do know it's a major pain to export data out of Google Workspace grasp.
I also think Microsoft in 1990 was a very different company that it is today. I also believe that it would be difficult for Microsoft today, to be anywhere near what it was in the 1990s. Microsoft is way more completive today than it was in 1990. Microsoft's approach to competition today is different compared to 1990.
I would like to point out, just because I do not hate (Google, Microsoft, Amazon) does not mean I agree with every policy they have, and I strongly believe all three of those companies have extreme faults.
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lol, why bother with a 3 month investigation? Trump picks are going to stop this ASAP the moment they're in, along with Google antitrust and probably Ticketmaster too.
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It's wild. Every agency doing business right now will turn into a complete clown show pretty soon and none of this shit will matter. I figured the new Trump admin would be pretty much the same as the last. But seeing his admin picks? The adults are literally leaving the room.
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It would be hard to spin this as "business friendly" considering the FTC is to examine complaints from businesses about abusive practices.
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It would certainly be for Microsoft. No supporter of abusive business practices, but looking at this from the tack the new administration is likely to take.
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Oh, sweet summer child - we will be remembering the last Trump administration with cherishing and reverence.
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The last Trump administration started the Google lawsuits - why would they stop them the moment they are in? They would probably not push for a breakup of Google as a remedy.
Whatever one thinks of the last and incoming Trump administration should not imply that any baseless claim is fair game. There was antitrust enforcement under Trump I and there is a signifcant share of the MAGA wing of the GOP who actually like Khan and are instinctively suspicious of large corporations (the traditional wing of the GOP less so). It's an open question how aggressive Trump II will be in enforcing antitrust.
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Who cares? The GOP has no problem doing things just to put Democrats on the record as voting no on the proposal and it clearly works for them electorally, the Democrats need to stop being so skittish about doing the same.
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I don't understand this. If they leave, they wouldn't be paying subscription fees anymore. Does it mean if they come back? or for there products they keeps? or something else?
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I absolutely don't mean to imply this as a defense of Google(both because I have no reason to think that they deserve one and because the "oh, you can kinda export your data but it can't really go anywhere because our product has only ever existed in cloud-ified form" trend seems super bad); but I suspect that Microsoft is more under fire because they have notably stronger position that Google to use their applications as a bludgeon to get people into their cloud.
If you've got corporate/EDU Office licensing the push is overwhelmingly into Azure, with some combination of frankly punitive pricing for non-cloud-linked licenses (ProPlus per machine Office seats vs. E3/E5 ones), and heavy pushes in terms of features that are Azure-only(Teams not even talking to on-prem sharepoint; newer windows server versions basically throwing azure management hooks in your face, etc).
Google...mostly doesn't...have that sort of on-prem beachhead. There are some chromebooks out there; and if you want to use cloud-delivered Chrome policies rather than GPOs or similar that's basically your option; but nothing on the scale of how many on-prem MS application users are getting Azured up with financial and technical pressures of varying intensity.
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Say what you will about Lina Khan, but one thing that can't be honestly lobbed against her is that she's a work shirker. She's been pretty active in her role at the FTC.
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That seems a less plausible explanation when the people who are going to get axed are likely to be getting axed specifically because of the work they have been doing, rather than because they are seen as not having done any work.
If the old boss and the new boss both just want roads built looking like you road crew is hard at work might be helpful; but if the new boss thinks that you are a liberal wokist road crew and they want a pro-business family values road looking busy is just increasing your visibility.
I suspect that the activity is to a degree performative: when there's not a lot of time left it's probably seen as a good time to release any cases that were seen as deserving but arduous to pursue, since you won't actually have a chance to pursue them; but don't want the case files to just get sent to the shredder without any public exposure.
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I am in agreement, here: In the fire alarm world, if you promise me that we will be inspecting 20 buildings per month, instead of a single one, you'll get a better price. If you promise me that we will be your sole source for repairs, rather than shopping them around, you'll get a better price. If you agree to a five year fire alarm monitoring agreement instead of year-to-year: You'll get a better price.
It seems like this complaint is more for political points, instead of any actual harms being done, since all of those options are presented to the customer at time of sign-up.
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After watching the FCC perpetually try to solve problems by giving Wall St owned ISPs and Telecoms bigger and bigger bags of subsidies, Khan's FTC was a breath of fresh air that made me believe that at least one federal agency actually has the best interest of the people in mind when determining what actions to take.
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I'm sure you're right. I suspect strongly that this will require a statement of political loyalty and/or a protection fee. We will soon enter a new age, I think, and it will be more like Putin's Russia than prior American norms.
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That is the entire point. I may have watched too much West Wing over the last year but the point is to get this in the news. So when it is dropped it is another thing to bring up on the next election cycle. Granted Americans have shown that none of that matters anymore. So really its just grasping at straws. Then again someone in the administration may have said business as usual, until it isn't.
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So Microsoft cannot push their own services? I look to Apple where you cannot run anyone else's services at times on their hardware, and Google which make it so difficult to run Android on a non-Google mobile device that I would rather use Apple hardware.
I just kind of feel that Microsoft, offering sweat heart licensing deals on Office 365 and Azure, is like the least serious thing Microsoft and other companies are doing. I mean COX Communication has absolutely no competition in my area, and I am being charged a higher rate, because there is no competition in my area. COX Communication is actually hurting me, Microsoft giving me a discount on an Azure contract, actually benefits me.
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YMMV, but from my professional experience, it appears that larger shops with byzantine budgeting and approval processes favor working with Microsoft since it puts many services on one invoice. Competition or not, it's often a real PITA to get approval and financials set up for multiple vendors, so there's a strong tendency to avoid this unless there's a really compelling reason.
This has even included widely used tools such as ADO vs. Jira. And once the in-house IT support is largely Microsoft, it creates even more friction because of support overhead.
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Yeah we better start today by pandering to the people who will already vote democratic, and do so with identity politics that the majority of the country rejects
We can splain to people how "good the economy is" when they can't buy a fucking house or car
We can ignore all the voters we don't like because they're "problematic" and then refuse to do any self reflection for 8 years
Yeah, dems have fucked up royally. We really need to accept that Biden didn't beat Trump, COVID did. If not for COVID Trump would have been reelected.
There are two truly popular politicians of the past decade. Trump, and Bernie.
Trump keeps winning because he has positioned himself as the Republican Bernie. That is the most succinct way to describe it. And anyone who feels emotionally uncomfortable because they didn't personally care for Bernie and the "Bernie bros?" Yeah, you really need to accept the possibility that the "Bernie bros" were just correct and you were just fuckin WRONG.
Or are we going to be like the conservatives we make fun of, and never self reflect or challenge our own beliefs? Are we just gonna let that be a bullshit token line on what we consider our ethical credential sheet, or are people going to TRY for once?
I am so fucking tired of arrogant liberals acting like they haven't been duped by propaganda for the last fucking decade. If liberals are sooo smart why do we keep getting fucked? Because we're NOT that smart and "republicans are stupid" is propaganda we fell for. It was intentional propaganda because people underestimate what they consider stupid. It worked.
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As everyone noted, this won't go very far due to changing administrations.
But, even if they weren't changing, I don't see how this would get very far in the courts. Just because they do restrictive rules and licensing doesn't mean they're abusing market power. I just don't see them having anything like monopoly power in the cloud space -AWS is the dominant player in that space.
But, even if they weren't changing, I don't see how this would get very far in the courts. Just because they do restrictive rules and licensing doesn't mean they're abusing market power. I just don't see them having anything like monopoly power in the cloud space -AWS is the dominant player in that space.
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