It’s happened, the weekly tech blog has occurred on a weekly basis! And I’ve got some great stories for you below.
Regulators have begun surveying the public cloud giant’s customers and competitors to gauge the extent of Microsoft’s monopolisation and anticompetitive practices. Apparently, the $1.8bn worth of fines for breaking EU antitrust rules over the last decade wasn’t a big enough sign.
It’s encouraging to see the EU commission act upon the obscene market dominance of big tech public cloud providers, following increasing calls to do so last year. An open and competitive landscape drives innovation and improves options for consumers. Something also needs to be done about AWS’ surprise billing and data transfer fees that amount to vendor lock in. I hope the EU has the chops to put them in their place.
Justifiably so. Amazon was planning to launch its own internal instant messaging service, but leaked documents have brought to light words, such as ‘union’ ‘pay rise’ ‘diversity’ ‘grievance’ and ‘slave labour’, to name but a few, would have potentially banned from the service. What was that? Did somebody say Karl Marx?
Besides from the blatant ethical issues here, this is an absolute PR disaster. Upsettingly, it probably won’t even mildly hurt the company.
[Insert very loud, disappointed sigh]. John Glen, the economic secretary for the treasury, stated the reason behind this ridiculous announcement was to seize an opportunity to build on the UK’s strength in FinTech and financial services, but I’m not really sure how an NFT from Her Majesty’s Treasury achieves this. It just sounds like they’re trying to be cool and get down with the kids.