![]() ![]() How the detente’s end affects spaces in which Google and Microsoft have openly cooperated remains to be seen. But recently, Microsoft has shown some of its old colors by giving Teams a leg-up on competitors, according to a complaint filed by Slack with the European Commission. That’s probably because the company’s recent success has been in markets that haven’t drawn the attention of regulators, including cloud computing and gaming, fields in which the company is a strong competitor, though not clearly dominant. While trust-busting sentiment has been ramping up in Congress and taking aim at Big Tech, Microsoft has been relatively unscathed thus far. Microsoft has another reason to drop the ceasefire-lately, it hasn’t been subjected to the same level of scrutiny as Google. The settlement in that case will result in Google changing the way its ad tools work with competitors, though not all changes will appear in all markets. That complaint echoes a similar one brought by the French Competition Authority, which after a two-year investigation found that Google had used other parts of its ad platform-DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange-to favor its own services by allowing the two halves to work better with each other than with competitors. It also complained that Google was providing bid details faster for ads on its own search engine. Advertisementįurther Reading Antitrust settlement forces Google to revamp ad platformMicrosoft approached UK regulators last year about its problems with Search Ads 360’s inability to keep up with Bing ad formats. Microsoft, in turn, sued Google for infringing patents related to reassembling an SMS message longer than 160 characters and for patents related to video compression it had originally developed for the Xbox. ![]() Google’s 2011 acquisition of Motorola Mobility, in which the search giant obtained a broad portfolio of patents, touched off a number of the suits and put Google on the offensive against Microsoft, which had been struggling to field a competitive mobile OS. ![]() When the two companies signed the pact in the fall of 2015, they were engaged in 18 lawsuits that ranged from cellular networking to video compression, SMS messaging, and more. Google’s unwillingness to work with Bing, he said, was costing the company hundreds of millions of dollars per year in ad revenue. “We raised the concerns with them, and they just turned a deaf ear,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said earlier this year. Other search engines that rely on Bing are also affected, including DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and Ecosia. As a result of the moves (or lack thereof), advertisers using Google’s ad platform found it easier to buy ads on Google, not Bing. In addition, an antitrust lawsuit filed by state attorneys general claims that Google also favors its own platform by offering automated auctions to optimize bids an equivalent tool isn’t available to advertisers seeking to book space on Bing. The ad tech problem surfaced just three years into the agreement, when Microsoft complained that Google was dragging its feet in supporting some of Bing’s new ad formats in one of its ad management tools, Search Ads 360. That lack of a resolution is what apparently led to the agreement’s unraveling, according to a new Bloomberg report. The matter ultimately reached the corner office, with CEOs Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai holding a series of talks that didn’t reach a solution. Further Reading Antitrust 101: Why everyone is probing Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and GoogleBoth companies attempted to solve the impasse through a series of escalating negotiations as laid out in the agreement. ![]()
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