June 25 (Reuters) – European regulators have launched a
series of probes into Big Tech. In the latest moves, the EU
antitrust authority charged Apple of breaching its
Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Microsoft of illegally
tying its Office and Teams products.

Here are some of the actions taken by European watchdogs
against big technology companies:

EUROPEAN UNION

EU antitrust regulators on June 25 charged Microsoft of
illegally bundling its chat and video app Teams with its Office
product, and said that more needed to be done to unbundle the
package.

The investigation was triggered by a 2020 complaint by
Salesforce-owned competing workspace messaging app
Slack.

Microsoft said it would work to find solutions to address
the regulators’ concerns.

The European Commission (EC) is also probing whether
Microsoft is preventing customers from relying on certain
security software provided by competitors, according to a
document regulators sent to at least one of its rivals in
January, seen by Reuters.

EU antitrust regulators have also said that Microsoft’s
investment of more than $10 billion in ChatGPT maker OpenAI may
be subject to EU merger rules.

OpenAI’s efforts to produce less factually false output from
its ChatGPT chatbot are not enough to ensure full compliance
with EU data rules, a task force at the bloc’s privacy watchdog
said in May.

The Commission said on June 24 that Apple’s App
Store rules breach the DMA by preventing app developers from
steering consumers to alternative offers, following an
investigation launched in March.

The EC is also opening a new investigation into Apple over
its new contractual requirements for third-party app developers
and app stores, it said.

Meta Platforms and Alphabet’s Google are
also being investigated for potential breaches of the DMA, the
EC said in March.

DMA violations could result in a fine of as much as 10% of a
company’s global annual turnover.

Brussels fined Apple 1.84 billion euros ($1.97 billion) on
March 4, its first ever EU antitrust penalty, following a 2019
complaint from Spotify. Apple said it would challenge
the decision in court.

Meta added safety features to its misinformation tracking
tool CrowdTangle for use during June’s European Parliament
elections in an attempt to allay EU concerns that triggered an
investigation in April into the impact of Meta’s decision to
phase out the tool.

Facebook and Instagram are also being investigated for
potential breaches of EU online content rules relating to child
safety, which could lead to hefty fines, the EC said on May 16.

An advisor to Europe’s top court said on Jan. 11 the court
should uphold Google’s EU antitrust fine of 2.42 billion euros
($2.60 billion). The EC fined the company in 2017 for using its
own price comparison shopping service to gain an unfair
advantage over smaller European rivals.

In September 2023, the EU named 22 so-called “gatekeeper”
services run by Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta,
Microsoft and TikTok-owner ByteDance, giving them six months to
comply with the DMA provisions meant to make it easier for
European users to move between competing services.

In April, the regulators designated Apple’s operating system
for iPads as a gatekeeper under the DMA.

Meta and TikTok appealed against the gatekeeper status in
November, with the latter losing a bid to suspend its
designation in February. Apple said in April it would continue
to engage with the EC to comply with the rules.

BRITAIN

In October, Britain’s media regulator asked the Competition
and Markets Authority to investigate Amazon and Microsoft’s
dominance of the UK cloud market. The CMA will complete its
investigation by April 2025.

FRANCE

France’s competition watchdog said in March it had fined
Google 250 million euros ($268 million) for breaches linked to
EU intellectual property rules in its relationship with media
publishers.

GERMANY

Google agreed to change its user data practices to end a
German antitrust investigation aimed at curbing its data-driven
market power, the German cartel office said in October. Google’s
commitments would give users more choice on how their data is
used across its platforms.

ITALY

Italy’s antitrust regulator said on June 5 it had fined
Facebook and Meta 3.5 million euros ($3.75 million) for what it
described as unfair commercial practices.

Last year, the agency opened a probe into Apple for alleged
abuse of its dominant position in the apps market, and took
measures against Meta over an alleged abuse of its position in
the country, in a probe involving the rights to music posted on
its platforms.

NETHERLANDS

The Dutch privacy watchdog in April recommended that
government organisations should stop using Facebook as long as
it is unclear what happens with personal data of users of the
government’s Facebook pages.

The country’s competition regulator last year rejected
Apple’s objections against fines of 50 million euros ($53.6
million) over a failure to comply with regulations aimed at
limiting the dominant position of its App Store. Apple will
appeal the decision in Dutch courts.

SPAIN

Spain’s data protection watchdog in May provisionally
suspended two planned Meta products that were to be deployed in
the EU election on Instagram and Facebook.

A group representing more than 700 startups in Spain issued
a complaint about Microsoft’s cloud practices to the country’s
antitrust regulator in May, citing several allegedly
anti-competitive practices in recent years.

($1 = 0.9323 euros)
(Compiled by Alessandro Parodi, Victor Goury-Laffont, Olivier
Cherfan, Paolo Laudani and Enrico Sciacovelli in Gdansk; editing
by Milla Nissi)