competition law

Japan’s competition watchdog executed an on‑site inspection of Microsoft’s Tokyo offices this week as part of a probe into whether the software giant steered customers toward its own Azure cloud through licensing and pricing practices — an inquiry that could reshape multicloud contracts, vendor...

Japan’s competition enforcers have executed an on-site inspection of Microsoft’s Japanese offices after local media and international reporting said the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) is investigating whether Microsoft improperly limited customers’ ability to run Microsoft software on rival...

Brazil’s competition authority has taken the brakes off a change that would have shut rival AI assistants out of WhatsApp, issuing interim measures that suspend Meta’s October 2025 Business Solution Terms and preserve third‑party AI access for Brazilian users while a full inquiry proceeds. The...

Microsoft now faces a landmark, potentially industry‑reshaping legal fight in the United Kingdom: a collective action accusing the company of using Windows Server licensing rules to penalize customers who run workloads on rival clouds — an approach that, claimants say, has the effect of steering...

Microsoft’s browser battleground has acquired a new skirmish line: OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas is being positioned as a potential Windows competitor, and evidence suggests Microsoft Edge is already testing the plumbing to intercept installs and nudge users toward Edge via Bing — a replay of...

Microsoft has quietly turned up the pressure on Windows users who try to install a competing browser: when you open Google Chrome’s download page in Microsoft Edge, some Windows installations now display a native banner that reframes the decision as an online-safety choice rather than a simple...

Italy’s competition watchdog has ordered Meta to reopen WhatsApp to rival AI chatbots, suspending new Business API terms that would have effectively barred general‑purpose assistants from the messaging platform while an abuse‑of‑dominance probe continues. Background / Overview The decision...

Italy’s competition authority has ordered Meta to suspend the WhatsApp Business Solution Terms that would have barred rival, general‑purpose AI chatbots from the messaging platform, legally pausing the platform’s planned January 15, 2026 enforcement and buying time for regulators to decide...

Meta’s move to exclude rival generative AI chatbots from WhatsApp has been paused in Italy as the country’s competition watchdog steps in, raising the stakes in a cross‑border clash between platform control and open AI competition. Background Since early 2025, WhatsApp has evolved from a pure...

Microsoft has begun rolling OpenAI’s GPT‑5.2 into Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio, placing a new two‑mode model family—GPT‑5.2 Instant for fast day‑to‑day writing and translation, and GPT‑5.2 Thinking for deeper reasoning and planning—directly into the flow of office work and agent...

Microsoft told a UK judge that a planned mass lawsuit over its cloud licensing is defective because the claim’s methodology cannot reliably identify who suffered loss or by how much, a procedural attack that — if successful — would block a high‑stakes Collective Proceedings Order and leave...

Microsoft’s Copilot will stop responding inside WhatsApp on January 15, 2026, after WhatsApp’s owner revised its Business API terms to explicitly bar third‑party, general‑purpose large‑language‑model (LLM) chatbots from operating as primary services through the platform. Background WhatsApp’s...

Microsoft is defending itself against a sweeping £2.1 billion class claim in the UK that accuses the company of deliberately making it more expensive and operationally awkward for thousands of British businesses to run Windows Server on rival cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS)...

Microsoft is back in the dock over cloud licensing, and this time the dispute sits at the intersection of antitrust law, enterprise procurement strategy, and the future shape of the cloud market itself — a dispute that could change how UK organisations buy and run Windows Server workloads...

The UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal has begun a pivotal review of whether a collective £2.1 billion lawsuit alleging discriminatory cloud-licensing and pricing by Microsoft should be certified and allowed to proceed to a full trial, a legal moment with potentially far-reaching consequences for...

Microsoft now faces the prospect of a landmark UK collective action that accuses the company of a deliberate, coherent abusive strategy to penalise businesses that run Windows Server on rival clouds — an allegation that, if allowed to proceed, could reshape enterprise licensing, cloud...

Microsoft is fighting to prevent a proposed multi‑billion‑pound collective suit over Windows Server licensing from becoming a full, jury‑style testing ground for how software giants price and tie their products to cloud infrastructure — a battle that could reshape cloud procurement, licensing...

Microsoft now faces a high-stakes legal and regulatory test in London after a collective claimant told the Competition Appeal Tribunal that the software giant ran a “coherent abusive strategy” designed to make running Windows Server on rival clouds materially more expensive — and in some cases...

Microsoft will tell judges at the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) that a proposed mass claim accusing it of anti‑competitive cloud licensing practices should be struck out because the plaintiffs’ methodology for proving common liability and quantifying loss is flawed, a move that puts the...

Microsoft will appeal the Competition Appeal Tribunal’s preliminary ruling that perpetual Microsoft licences — including Windows and Office — can be subdivided and resold, setting the stage for a protracted fight over the legal boundaries of software resale, exhaustion and vendor control in the...