Microsoft facing multibillion-pound legal claim over software licence pricing
The opt-out claim has been brought by barrister Alexander Wolfson, and says it could apply to millions of UK consumers, businesses and public bodies who have purchased licences for products such as Microsoft Office and Windows.
The claim alleges that the US tech giant has abused its market dominance and imposed restrictive licensing practices which hampered competition and inflated prices.
As a result, it claims, consumers and businesses who purchased licences for some Microsoft software products between October 1 2015 and the present day were overcharged.
'Microsoft's actions have had a significant and far-reaching impact on UK consumers, businesses and public bodies,' Mr Wolfson said.
'This claim seeks to hold Microsoft to account and to secure compensation for the many affected members of the class.
'With billions of pounds potentially at stake, this case is about ensuring fairness in the digital marketplace and ensuring even the largest tech companies play by the rules.'
Kate Pollock, head of competition ligation at law firm Stewarts, which is working with Mr Wolfson, said: 'Microsoft's conduct has had a profound and costly impact on millions of individuals and private and public sector organisations that rely on its software for daily business operations.
'We believe that Microsoft abused its market dominance by imposing restrictive licensing practices that effectively shut down competition and inflated prices.
'We're proud to be supporting Alexander Wolfson in bringing this claim.
'With our specialist experience in complex competition litigation, we are well placed to help secure justice for the millions affected. This case has the potential to restore greater fairness and accountability to the UK's increasingly digital economy.'
Microsoft has been contacted for comment.
In December, a separate £1 billion claim was filed with the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal, alleging Microsoft customers using rival cloud computing platforms to Microsoft's own Azure were charged higher licensing fees to access its Windows server.
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Scottish Sun
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Major broadband provider with 1.5million customers is AXING free service and introducing £15 charge
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The Guardian
11 hours ago
- The Guardian
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I don't think they understand that by quitting I am not trying to help the cause,' the Google staffer said. 'I'm at a [spiritual and moral] negative right now. I'm just trying to go back to neutral. Every day my work is actively harming people. I can't help people if I'm actively harming them.' The debate is not confined to the cafeterias of tech companies. Several tech workers said they have sought the spiritual insight of popular Islamic scholars, including Imam Omar Suleiman, the founding president of the Yaqeen Institute, a Texas-based Islamic research organization. Suleiman is actively engaging with Microsoft workers to help determine 'if there's any part of Microsoft that wouldn't be considered complicit in this', he said. The imam said he is still grappling with the question of whether and how urgently Muslims need to quit their tech jobs, leaving the workers to wrestle with it privately for now. 'More fields of employment are complicated than not,' Suleiman said. 'It's not always as straightforward as someone that works at a liquor store. It's someone that works at a grocery store [that sells alcohol].' Details of how big tech works with the IDF have long been murky, and many tech staffers had mostly accepted their employers' denials or defenses of these contracts. But recently, evidence that the tech industry's products have been used in Israel's violent campaign in Gaza, which the UN has concluded is consistent with 'the characteristics of genocide', has been mounting. Microsoft deepened its ties with the Israeli military in the wake of Hamas's 7 October 2023 attacks, according to a Guardian investigation reported in collaboration with +972 Magazine and Local Call, based in part on documents obtained by Drop Site News. Leaked documents indicated Microsoft has a 'footprint in all major military infrastructures' in Israel. The Associated Press has also reported that Microsoft technology has aided in Israel's surveillance of Palestinians. 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Organizing does not absolve you of complicity indefinitely.' 'If you know that the company you work for is directly enabling harmful activities, then maybe your money is not completely halal,' Ibraheem said. Aboussad said that in the days after she protested in the meeting, she received dozens of direct messages on Instagram from other Muslim tech workers. Many said she inspired them to do more to oppose their company's actions, and some said they were even thinking of resigning, Aboussad recalled. One person said her demonstration 'removed any excuses' they might have made about not doing more to oppose their employers' work with the IDF. The debates aren't limited to the companies' US offices. For some workers at Microsoft's offices across the Middle East and north Africa, Aboussad and Agrawal's protest was one of the first times they were confronted with the depth of their employers' work with the Israeli military. For others, their concerns about their roles at the company had long been brewing. One worker, based out of Microsoft's Cairo office, told the Guardian she had been weary for months of what she saw as a vehement pro-Israeli stance in Microsoft's internal communications to employees and their lack of mention of the now more than 50,000 Palestinians who have been killed by the IDF. The first time she began to wonder whether she belonged at Microsoft as a Muslim was when the company fired Nasr and another worker after the two organized a vigil for Palestinians. Aboussad and Agrawal's protest about six months later helped her answer that question, she said. Their demonstration prompted about 100 employees in the Cairo office to take a day off in protest of Microsoft's work with Israel – an action that was just shy of striking, which is generally illegal in Egypt. On that day, she decided she would quit. 'The response of [Suleyman] and [Microsoft CEO] Satya [Nadella] was very dismissive,' she said. 'And I think Satya laughed, and that sort of made me feel like, no, I don't think I belong here, and me staying here is just supporting what they're doing.' None of the Google or Microsoft workers who spoke to the Guardian had any doubt about whether their employers were contributing to Israeli military operations. But some held out hope the company may switch strategies. One person who has worked at Microsoft for nearly a dozen years said they felt betrayed by the company, which sold them on its 2014 mission of 'empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more'. But they remain hopeful that internal pressure might force the company to change its policy on working with the Israeli government. 'I know during South African apartheid, the company did flip to the right side,' they said, citing Microsoft's decision to leave South Africa in 1986 in response to the country's laws enforcing racial discrimination. 'I hope that history repeats itself and they become the company where the culture is that you make everyone feel great.' Meanwhile, workers' protests have continued. At Microsoft, NoAA has disrupted at least two more company events, prompting the company to fire at least one of the workers, Joe Lopez. Another staffer, senior UX designer Jasmina Mathieu, resigned publicly, stating in an email to leadership and employees that she could no longer work at a company that directly or indirectly enables 'horrific actions done by Israel'. Since then, the Microsoft staffers said, they can no longer send emails to anyone, including human resources, that contained the words 'genocide', 'Gaza', 'Palestine' or even 'Vaniya Agrawal'. One worker with NoAA, Nisrine Jaradat, was able to get around the block and send an email to all Microsoft staff decrying the policy that 'utterly and completely discriminate[s] against an entire nation, an entire people, and an entire community'. Jaradat called on her co-workers to either organize against the company's work with the IDF or quit. 'If you choose to leave Microsoft to no longer be complicit in genocide do not go quietly,' Jaradat wrote. Many workers have consulted with local religious leaders and scholars but have not been given a clear response. 'We've been wanting to get an opinion that says, you know, 'Just quit, you should not be working here,' but we did not,' one Microsoft worker said. 'They just say it depends on the situation.' Imam Omar Suleiman has been helping people figure out whether working at certain companies is halal or permissible for the entire 20 years he's been a religious leader. Over the last two years, Muslims tech workers from around the country have reached out to Suleiman's Yaqeen Institute with the same question: can I still work at a tech company that is helping power the Israeli military? For Suleiman, tech has been one of the hardest fields to navigate 'because you have Muslims that work at various levels and tech companies are involved in this genocide to varying extents', he said. What Suleiman and the Yaqeen Institute – where Aboussad now works – ultimately decide matters a great deal to tech workers of a certain age. The institute is well regarded among millennial Muslims in the US for its easy-to-digest content on how to understand and apply the teachings of the Qur'an. Suleiman's videos have garnered him more than 3 million Instagram followers. Nearly every tech worker who the Guardian spoke to cited Suleiman's speeches shared on social media as inspiration for why they want to leave Google or Microsoft. Yet for Suleiman, who recently gave an impassioned speech, or khutbah, at a Virginia mosque urging congregants to 'have some dignity' and quit their jobs at arms manufacturers, whether Islam requires that these tech workers leave their jobs with the same urgency is still an open question. Like Suleiman's example of a clerk at a grocery store selling alcohol alongside fruits and vegetables, it is not as clearcut if coding productivity tools poses the same grave transgression as building a bomb. Suleiman and others at the Yaqeen Institute are working on developing a general framework that will help Muslims decide whether they can religiously justify working at any of the tech firms contracting with the IDF. That framework will be published as a resource for both local imams as well as individuals in the midst of a spiritual crisis about their jobs. Suleiman looks at cases from many different sides. Staff have to ask themselves personal questions. Islamic religious law advises all Muslims to leave something that causes them doubt for something that doesn't. But, he cautions, many cases are complicated. You might be the primary breadwinner of your household, have an employer-sponsored visa or be working at a part of the company that you feel doesn't have anything to do with the products the firm builds for militaries, such as LinkedIn. One also has to evaluate whether you're having a positive impact by staying in the company. 'There's room for the person who holds back the hand of the pharaoh from inside the pharaoh's court,' Suleiman said. 'But they have to demonstrate how exactly [they are] minimizing that harm without at any point becoming a mouthpiece for oppression.' And they need to evaluate the workings of their companies, he said. Do they produce haram, or impermissible, products, like alcohol or weapons used to kill people? In those cases, 'they need to leave their job and they need to find a different job depending on what layer they participate in and how much need they have', Suleiman said. Or is the company based around usury or interest-based transactions, which are also impermissible in Islam? In those cases, you can still work at the company, but you should up your charity to offset those haram transactions. While Islamic jurisprudence has an established structure to make these decisions, Suleiman says tech remains a complicated matter to locate within that framework. The imam said he is still in the discovery phase on how the roles workers find themselves in at these companies align with their religious duty. 'It's very hard to compare something that's just purely generating weapons of mass destruction and a tech company that has a wide array of businesses, but also happens to be manufacturing for a genocide,' he said. 'It's hard for me to figure out when that line disappears.'
Daily Mail
12 hours ago
- Daily Mail
World Bank issues grim economic forecast, citing Trump's trade wars
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