European Union: European Commission opened consultation on Microsoft’s proposed commitments addressing anticompetitive practices related to Teams

On 16 May 2025, the European Commission opened a consultation on commitments offered by Microsoft to address preliminary competition concerns related to the tying of its communication and collaboration product, Teams, with its productivity suites for businesses, Office 365 and Microsoft 365. The investigation, launched in July 2023, preliminarily found that since April 2019, Microsoft may have abused its dominant position in the market for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) productivity applications for professional use by tying Teams to its core SaaS productivity applications, potentially restricting competition in the market for unified communication and collaboration products. To address the Commission's concerns, Microsoft offered several commitments. These include offering customers purchasing in the European Economic Area (EEA) versions of Office 365 and Microsoft 365 suites without Teams at a lower price and not offering higher discount rates on Teams or suites with Teams than on suites without Teams. Microsoft also committed to affording customers in the EEA recurrent opportunities to switch to suites without Teams, allowing deployment in data centers worldwide. Furthermore, Microsoft proposed allowing Teams' competitors and certain third parties enhanced interoperability with identified Microsoft products and services for specific functionalities, enabling them to embed Office Web Applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) in their products, and to prominently integrate their products in Microsoft's core productivity applications. The commitments also include allowing customers in the EEA to extract their Teams messaging data for use in competing solutions. These commitments, if made binding, would remain in force for seven years, with interoperability and data portability obligations lasting ten years, monitored by a trustee.