EUCLIDIA supports Nextcloud's legal action to stop Microsoft's anti-competitive behaviour on the European market

Barcelona, Berlin, Paris, Wien, 26. November, 2021 - EUCLIDIA, the European Cloud Industrial Alliance, supports Nextcloud's legal action to stop Microsoft's anti-competitive behaviour on the European market, and calls to stop similar behaviours by other predatory actors like Google and Amazon.

We applaud the European Union's determination to fight such abuses of dominant positions, and call for the Members of the Parliament to include cloud software in the scope of the the Digital Markets Act (DMA) to ensure:

  • No gate keeping (by practices like bundling, pre-installing or self-preferencing) for a level playing field.
  • Open standards and interoperability obligations that make an easy migration possible and affordable, to provide consumers and business users with free choice.

Consumers and business users should have a free choice and competition from the European cloud ecosystem (100+ innovative companies) should have fair access to the market!

"With Euclidia, we are demonstrating that European SMEs can offer competitive cloud solutions to governments and the industry. What we cannot compete with is dishonnest and massive lobbying, anti-competitive behavior and abuse of dominant market positions. We therefore support the initiative of Euclidia member Nextcloud and support the European Commission's determination to ensure a fair competitive landscape across the continent and in the cloud," says Philipp Reisner, Vice-President of Euclidia.

"By embedding services like OneDrive, Teams or parts of Office 365 in Windows, Microsoft is forcing customer choices and therefore harming the complete IT ecosystem in Europe. Microsoft should compete on the merits of their solution, not pushing it down users throats with anti-competitive behaviours. We urge lawmakers to put an end to these practices," says Gaël Duval, founder and of CEO ECorp/Esolutions.

"We need to re-balance the European market around collaborative tools in order to limit Microsoft's anti-competitive actions around its bundled solutions like MS365". says Alain GARNIER, CEO of Jamespot.

"Microsoft is using single point of access to prevent diversity and tie the consumer to its solutions. We are back to the end of the 90s with Microsoft dominance," says Valentin Przyluski, CEO of Netframe.

"Microsoft has been sentenced in the past in both the US and Europe for abusing their market position. Yet, here we are again. European citizens greatly benefit from having a competitive marketplace and it is the EU who has to ensure it remains this way. If fines are no longer a strong deterrent, maybe it is time to revisit the original US judgement from 2000 which asked to dismantle Microsoft." says Jean-Paul SMETS, CEO of Rapid.Space.

"In the technology industry, many actors use bundling to push new offers and services to captive consumers, allowing them to increase their stronghold on the market. This hurts competition and hinders innovation in Europe. We support the action against Microsoft anti-competitive behaviour and urge the European Commission to push for fair competition in the European IT industry, as well as imposing open standards and interoperability as a mean to allow new competitors to enter the market." says Ludovic Dubost, founder and CEO of XWiki.

"The 90s have just called and they see that nothing has changed. Microsoft's anti-competitive practices remain a major concern for the competitiveness of the European software and cloud industry. As it has done in the past in similar cases, the European Commission must put an end to these practices," says Stefane Fermigier, founder and CEO of Abilian.

For more information, please refer to the Nextcloud antitrust website: https://antitrust.nextcloud.com/

About Euclidia

The European Cloud Industrial Alliance (EUCLIDIA) is an industrial alliance formed by independent European original technology makers, for the promotion of digital independence and strategic autonomy. It carries the voice of European cloud technology innovators. It provides lawmakers and national policymakers with the field expertise and vision that will reinforce policies that accelerate the adoption and development of leading cloud technologies made in Europe. It advocates policies that reflect European values such as the protection of privacy and the promotion of fair competition while enabling European cloud industries to be competitive.

EUCLIDIA maintains a list of European-based cloud solutions based on European cloud technologies: see here.

Contact:

  • Jean-Paul Smets / jp@nexedi.com / +33 629 02 44 25 (French, English, Japanese)
  • Philipp Reisner / philipp.reisner@linbit.com (German, English)