Microsoft and Google reportedly ended their 6-year-old truce in legal battles and are preparing for yet another war.
According to Bloomberg, the two tech giants formed an unusual pact in 2015 when the two CEOs joined the companies. The pact expired in April, however, the companies decided not to renew it in order for them to freely shoot complaints against each other behind the scenes.
Microsoft, Google at loggerheads
The two tech giants have been at loggerheads over web search, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. Earlier this year Microsoft publicly supported a law in Australia that forced Google to pay news publishers for their content while Google accused Microsoft of breaking the way the open web works.
Microsoft wants marketers to be afforded equal access to search engines when they organise campaigns with Google’s technology, and for content creators to get paid.
Google seems to think that Microsoft has other motives because they see Google as a threat to Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing and Office productivity businesses.
“If you want to advertise, if you want to sell advertising or buy advertising on the internet, you have to use Google’s tools, and when they make their tools in a manner that fails to interoperate easily with others, it impacts everybody,” said Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith in an interview with Bloomberg in April.
“We raised the concerns with them and they just turned a deaf ear,” he said.
CEOs fail to make a truce
The companies’ chief executive officers, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Google’s Sundar Pichai, seem to have failed to quieten the storm between the two companies by talking it out, which was the final resolution before the situation reached regulators.
According to BusinessDay, under the peace treaty, only once all the efforts laid out in the accord have been exhausted could one company take its grievance to regulators.
By last year, Microsoft had spoken with U.K. officials and regulators in some U.S. states about the ad-tech issue.