Commission accepts commitments offered by Microsoft to address competition concerns related to Teams

This article is brought to you in association with the European Commission.

The European Commission has accepted commitments from Microsoft to address EU competition concerns relating to its popular team collaboration platform Teams. These commitments will henceforth be legally binding under EU antitrust rules.

The commitments address the Commission’s concerns related to the tying of Microsoft Teams to the company’s popular productivity applications Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, included in its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 suites for business customers.

Under the commitments, Microsoft will (i) make available versions of these suites without Teams and at a reduced price; (ii) allow customers with long-term licenses to switch to suites without Teams; (iii) provide interoperability for key functionalities between communication and collaboration tools that compete with Teams and certain Microsoft products; and (iv) allow customers to move their data out of Teams to facilitate the use of competing solutions.

By helping to restore fair competition, these commitments will open up the market for other providers of communication and collaboration tools in Europe.

The Commission’s competition concerns

Microsoft is a global technology company offering various services, including productivity and business software, cloud computing and personal computing. Teams is a cloud-based communication and collaboration tool. It offers functionalities such as messaging, calling, video meetings and file sharing, and brings together Microsoft and third-party workplace tools and other applications.

Suppliers of business application software, including Microsoft, are increasingly distributing this software as Software-as-a-Service (‘SaaS’), meaning a software hosted on cloud infrastructure of the supplier’s choice. Microsoft has a suite-centric business model combining multiple types of software in a single offering. When Teams was launched, Microsoft included it by default in Office 365 and Microsoft 365, its widely used SaaS productivity suites for business customers.

Following the opening of a formal investigation in July 2023, the Commission preliminarily found (i) that Microsoft holds a dominant position in the worldwide market for SaaS productivity applications for professional use; and that (ii) since at least April 2019, Microsoft has been tying Teams with its market-leading productivity applications, in breach of Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (‘TFEU’) and Article 54 of the Agreement on the European Economic Area (‘EEA Agreement’).

The Commission preliminarily found that, by doing so, Microsoft restricted competition on the market for cloud-based communication and collaboration products, granting Teams an undue competitive advantage in terms of distribution, which was reinforced by interoperability limitations between Microsoft’s productivity applications (e.g. Outlook, Word) and communication and collaboration tools that compete with Teams. The Commission had concerns that Microsoft’s conduct, in addition to giving Teams an unfair advantage in entering and quickly gaining a strong position in the market, may have reinforced its dominant position in productivity software and its suites-centric model from competing suppliers of individual software.

After the opening of the investigation, in 2023 and 2024, Microsoft introduced certain changes in the way it distributes Teams. In particular, Microsoft started offering some suites without Teams. The Commission preliminarily found that these changes were insufficient to address its concerns and that more extensive changes were necessary to effectively end the anticompetitive tying practice and its effects.

The commitments

To address the Commission’s concerns, Microsoft initially offered the following commitments:

• To offer customers purchasing in the EEA versions of its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 suites without Teams and do so at an appreciably lower price than the one for the corresponding suites that include Teams. In addition, Microsoft committed not to offer discount rates on Teams or on suites with Teams higher than those offered on suites without Teams.
• To give customers purchasing in the EEA recurrent opportunities to switch to suites without Teams and allow for such suites to be deployed in datacentres worldwide.
• To allow Teams’ competitors and certain third parties (i) effective interoperability with certain Microsoft products and services for specific functionalities, as well as (ii) to embed the Office Web Applications (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) in their own products, and to (iii) prominently integrate their products in Microsoft’s core productivity applications.
• To allow customers in the EEA to extract their Teams messaging data for use in competing solutions.

Between 16 May 2025 and 16 June 2025, the Commission market tested Microsoft’s commitments and consulted all interested third parties to verify whether they would remove the Commission’s competition concerns. In light of the outcome of this market test, Microsoft amended the initial proposal and further committed to:

• increase the price difference between some Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites without Teams and the corresponding suites with Teams, including the suites targeted at businesses, by 50%.
• clarify that relevant Microsoft websites that advertise any software offer that includes a suite with Teams should also display the corresponding offer without Teams.
• publish information on interoperability and data portability on all its relevant developer-facing websites.

In addition, the Commission takes note that Microsoft has unilaterally decided to align its worldwide suites offers and pricing with these commitments. It has also decided to continue offering suites without Teams for frontline workers and to further reduce the price of its largest suite without Teams for frontline workers compared to the version with Teams.

The commitments offered by Microsoft will remain in force for seven years, except for the commitments related to interoperability and data portability which will remain in force for ten years. The implementation will be monitored by a monitoring trustee, who will also mediate in case of disputes between third parties and Microsoft. If a third-party concern persists, the dispute will be subject to fast-track arbitration. The monitoring trustee will report regularly to the Commission.

The Commission concluded that Microsoft’s final commitments would adequately address its competition concerns over Microsoft’s conduct. It therefore decided to make them legally binding on Microsoft.

Background

On 27 July 2023, following a complaint by Slack Technologies, Inc., now owned by Salesforce, Inc., the Commission opened a formal antitrust investigation to assess whether Microsoft’s conduct in connection with the distribution of Teams violates EU competition rules.

Following a subsequent complaint by alfaview GmbH, on 25 June 2024 the Commission opened a second antitrust investigation. On the same day, the Commission sent a Statement of Objections informing Microsoft of its preliminary view that, since at least April 2019, the company abused its dominant position in the market for SaaS productivity applications for professional use by tying Teams to its core SaaS productivity applications.

On 16 May 2025, the Commission launched a market test on the commitments offered by Microsoft, which ran until 16 June 2025. Following the market test, both Slack Technologies, Inc. and alfaview GmbH withdrew their complaints.

Article 102 TFEU prohibits the abuse of a dominant position that may affect trade within the EU and prevent or restrict competition. The implementation of this provision is defined in Regulation 1/2003.

Article 9(1) of Regulation 1/2003 enables companies investigated by the Commission to offer commitments to meet the Commission’s concerns and empowers the Commission to make such commitments binding on the companies.

Article 27(4) of Regulation 1/2003 requires that before adopting such decision, the Commission shall provide interested third parties with an opportunity to comment on the offered commitments (‘the market test’).

If the market test indicates that the commitments are a satisfactory way of addressing the Commission’s competition concerns, the Commission may adopt a decision making them legally binding on Microsoft. Such a decision would not conclude that there is an infringement of EU antitrust rules but would legally bind the company concerned to respect the commitments it has offered.

If the company does not honour such commitments, the Commission may impose a fine of up to 10% of its worldwide annual turnover, without having to prove an infringement of EU antitrust rules, or a periodic penalty payment of 5% per day of its daily turnover for every day of non-compliance.

More information, including the full text of the commitments, will be available on the Commission’s competition website, in the public case register under case numbers AT.40721 and AT.40873.

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