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Microsoft faces wide-ranging US antitrust probe

erek

erek

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"The FTC has demanded a broad range of detailed information from Microsoft, Bloomberg reported earlier on Wednesday.
The agency had already claimed jurisdiction over probes into Microsoft and OpenAI over competition in artificial intelligence, and started looking into Microsoft's $650 million deal with AI startup Inflection AI.
Microsoft has been somewhat of an exception to U.S. antitrust regulators' recent campaign against allegedly anticompetitive practices at Big Tech companies.

Facebook owner Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab, Apple (AAPL.O), opens new tab, and Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN.O), opens new tab have all been accused by the U.S. of unlawfully maintaining monopolies.
Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google is facing two lawsuits, including one where a judge found it unlawfully thwarted competition among online search engines.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified at Google's trial, saying the search giant was using exclusive deals with publishers to lock up content used to train artificial intelligence.
It is unclear whether Trump will ease up on Big Tech, whose first administration launched several Big Tech probes. JD Vance, the incoming vice president, has expressed concern about the power the companies wield over public discourse.
Still, Microsoft has benefited from Trump policies in the past.
In 2019, the Pentagon awarded it a $10 billion cloud computing contract that Amazon had widely been expected to win. Amazon later alleged that Trump exerted improper pressure on military officials to steer the contract away from its Amazon Web Services unit.
The Technology Roundup newsletter brings the latest news and trends straight to your inbox. Sign up here.

Reporting by Jody Godoy in New York; editing by Jonathan Oatis, Richard Chang, Alistair Bell and Sonali Paul"

Source: https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-faces-wide-ranging-us-antitrust-probe-2024-11-27/
 
I keep writing rants here... so I will try to keep this one short.
The DoJ is going after all the platforms that are kicking Amazon's ass right now.

Biden and Bezos may have a public feud, but Amazon and the DoJ are far more friendly than they should be.

Amazon lost that $10B contract for a good reason, they had serious security concerns, and no that $10B was not awarded to Microsoft, it was awarded to a dozen different companies because the Military decided placing all their eggs in a single basket was dangerous and created a single visible weak point in their infrastructure.
It should be noted that shortly after finding out the contract was not going to Amazon it was revealed they had been the target of a major data breech, and less than a year later they were again the target of another huge data breach. So the Military's security concerns were validated, because it was proven their security was not in a good place.

The DoJ is focusing on a few key things, AI, Entra ID, and the potential costs in moving data off Microsoft services.
It's funny that the DoJ only got interested in Microsoft there after it was exposed that Amazons alternatives to them were slow, hard to support, and easy to hack.

The DoJ is afraid that Microsoft has access to too much training data and resources that they aren't sharing, why should companies be required to share their training data, there is obviously going to be proprietary data in there or licensed data, they shouldn't have to share that with competitors, building those training sets is a huge part of developing an AI.

Entra ID is good, what isn't good is Amazon's version of it being AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), it lacks features, documentation, it's harder to use, less intuitive, has less compatibility, doesn't work well with SSO, it's cloud directory constantly breaks and it's passwordless authentication features are best not used because they cause more problems than they fix. But it's Microsoft who is stopping developers for supporting IAM...

Microsoft does charge more than average to move data out of the cloud, and it's not easy to migrate system images that are stored in VHDX over to AWS EC2. But Microsoft also charges far less for data storage and does not charge for data uploaded.
So out of all the complaints the DoJ makes this is the only one I can really get behind, but it shouldn't be on Microsoft to make VHDX files easier to work with, this is the sort of situation that a proper backup and recovery plan is designed for, you back up your Azure based system and you restore it into an Amazon one, you don't try to do an inline migration using some line converter going from VHDX to VHD to EC2 like Amazon tries to do.

This feels like the DoJ going after Amazon's rivals as a last hurrah as a way to get in good with Amazon so in a few months when they leave the DoJ they have a new job lined up.
 
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