Nextcloud and ~30 other EU companies file an antitrust complaint with the European Commission against Microsoft for bundling OneDrive and Teams with Windows
Nextcloud and almost 30 other European companies have filed a complaint about Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior with its OneDrive cloud storage offering. Source: Nextcloud and Nextcloud .
Context & Ripple Effects
Slack’s earlier EU complaint over Teams tied to Office 365 had already put Microsoft’s software-bundling practices before European regulators. Nextcloud and roughly 30 European companies now extend the challenge to OneDrive and Teams bundled with Windows.
The complaint sits in a broader enforcement arc that later included an EU investigation into Teams’ tie to Office and preliminary findings that Teams received an undue advantage from that bundle.
First-order effects
- Microsoft must defend its Windows distribution of OneDrive and Teams before the European Commission, while Nextcloud and the other complainants formally put their competing services’ access to users at issue.
- The complaint expands the alleged tying concern from Teams’ relationship with Office to the way Windows can distribute both collaboration and cloud-storage services.
Second-order effects
- European cloud-storage and collaboration providers gain a shared regulatory channel to contest Microsoft’s default distribution advantages rather than competing only on product features.
- Microsoft faces scrutiny across more than one bundle, making remedies or concessions aimed solely at Office and Teams less likely to resolve competitors’ broader concerns.
Third-order effects
- If European enforcement continues to treat preinstallation and suite bundling as distribution advantages, dominant software platforms will face more pressure to compete through interoperability and user choice rather than default placement.
- The pattern points toward antitrust reviews assessing connected product ecosystems as a whole, not just a single application tie.
The trend: European competition scrutiny is increasingly focused on how dominant software platforms use operating systems and productivity suites to distribute adjacent services.