The lobbying world has gained a new body, the Open Cloud Coalition (OCC). The club presents itself as a group championing open standards and fairer competition within the EU and UK cloud markets. According to Microsoft, however, the OCC is nothing more than an attempt by Google to hinder the former in the cloud market.
According to Microsoft lawyer Rima Alaily, the OCC is merely an ‘astroturfing’ group in which Google has disproportionate influence. Astroturfing is a term for an apparent grassroots organization that secretly has a much larger entity behind it, in this case, Google (Astroturf is a brand of artificial grass).
Alaily states in her blog post that Google aims to set up competition authorities against Microsoft. Within the OCC, Google would recruit smaller, local European cloud providers, aiming to move regulatory issues regarding cloud activities in a direction unfavorable to Microsoft. In addition, it would be a promotional tool for Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
A few mice and an elephant
The members of the OCC are small European and British players, including Centerprise, Civo and Spain’s Gigas. And Google, which is a bit reminiscent of a joke in which a mouse and an elephant walking across a bridge, with the mouse remarking about their footsteps: ‘What a noise we’re making!’ In any case, the OCC itself says its goal is to promote open standards in cloud policy and advise policymakers on regulations that are good for both security and competition. Head of the OCC is Nicky Stewart, former head of ICT strategy at the British Cabinet Office, which is in close contact with the prime minister and other ministries. Stewart is also head of Civo, mentioned above.
The creation of the OCC follows a settlement between Microsoft and another European industry association, Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE). That body previously ran a long-running complaints procedure about Microsoft’s dominance but backtracked completely after some concessions from the tech giant. Interestingly, CISPE also has a major U.S. player putting its thumb on the scales, namely AWS.
Hyperscalers srutinised
So, it seems that Google wants to counter Microsoft’s lobbying efforts with its own group. Following the CISPE settlement, the company has also filed its own complaint with the European Commission. Microsoft would allegedly artificially inflate the cost of running its own software in other vendor’s clouds. This is at the heart of many complaints: hyperscalers making it cheaper and easier to run their services in their own cloud environments or, conversely, more difficult and expensive to run their services in other clouds. This is not allowed under European competition rules.
In any case, big tech companies have attracted the interest of many lawmakers or regulatory bodies. The British Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is investigating vendor lock-in tactics in the cloud sector, and the European Commission is also expected to scrutinise the practices of cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft and Google. In the US, calls abound for Google to divest parts of its product offering.
Also read: Who will turn Europe into more than a digital dependency?