File hosting service provider Nextcloud has decided to drop its complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition. The reason: since filing the complaint four years ago, there’s been no noticeable progress.
“Given the lack of interest from the European Commission, lengthy process, and costs on our side, Nextcloud decided to withdraw the complaint,” the company stated in a press release.
In 2021, Nextcloud, along with 30 other organizations, filed a complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission for anti-competitive behavior. The plaintiffs objected to Microsoft's promotion of its own services in Windows, for example, by integrating OneDrive with Windows.
“Microsoft is integrating 365 deeper and deeper in its service and software portfolio, including Windows. OneDrive is pushed wherever users deal with file storage, and Teams is a default part of Windows 11. This makes it nearly impossible to compete with their SaaS [Software-as-a-Service, ed.] services. Behavior like this is at the core of this growth of the tech giants and has to be stopped,” Nextcloud argued at the time.
The signatories argued that these business practices were harming the IT industry and limiting customer choice. Therefore, they demanded a ban on pre-installing and pushing Microsoft services to create a level playing field and to promote interoperability between services.
Since then, four years have passed, and we’re nowhere near a solution. As a matter of fact, things have only gotten worse. According to Nextcloud, Microsoft has been forcing users to create a Microsoft account to use Windows, which is bundled with OneDrive and other services, and automatically uploads users’ data to their cloud.
“This kind of behavior limits consumer choice and creates a barrier for other companies offering competing services,” the file hosting service provider states.
An investigation with the Bundeskartellamt, Germany’s Federal Cartel Office, against Microsoft for abusing its dominant market position to promote its cloud services is still ongoing.
In 2023, the European Commission acted on a similar complaint from Slack, which accused Microsoft of anticompetitive behavior by integrating its chat application, Teams, with Office. In the end, this resulted in Microsoft unbundling Teams from Office, which was accepted by the European Commission in September 2025.
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