The Microsoft Antitrust Probe Survived the Administration — and It's Coming for the 'Azure Tax'

Donald Trump is keeping the Microsoft antitrust probe alive. Per Bloomberg reporting this week, the president has decided to continue the sweeping FTC investigation into Microsoft that began under Joe Biden in November 2024 — a rare case of antitrust enforcement surviving a party switch, and a signal that Redmond's licensing practices are now under genuinely bipartisan fire.

Neither Microsoft nor the FTC would comment on the decision. But the substance of what's being investigated hasn't changed: allegations that Microsoft uses its grip on business software to tilt the playing field in cloud, locking customers in with licensing terms that punish anyone who runs Microsoft software anywhere but Azure.

What the Microsoft antitrust probe actually covers

The probe's scope is wide. It spans cloud computing, software licensing, the bundling of Office and productivity software plus security products with cloud offerings, cybersecurity products, AI products, and Microsoft's large government contracts. In recent weeks, the FTC issued civil investigative demands — effectively civil subpoenas — to at least half a dozen Microsoft competitors across business software and cloud. That's a classic sign of staff lawyers building a case, not winding one down.

The 'Azure tax' is the industry's favorite villain

The technical core of the complaint is licensing. Since October 2019, running Microsoft software on a non-Microsoft cloud has required Software Assurance and license mobility rights under a "Listed Providers" program — and the excluded providers read like a who's who of Microsoft's cloud rivals: AWS, Google, and Alibaba. Industry critics have a name for the upcharge customers face when they take their Windows and Office workloads elsewhere: the "Azure tax."

Whether that tax is illegal is the FTC's question to answer. Microsoft's defense has always been that enterprise licensing is complicated and that customers still choose Azure. But regulators keep circling the same mechanism. The UK's competition watchdog already took a harder look, finding that Microsoft and AWS were "generating sustained returns substantially above their cost of capital" in cloud services and placing both under further investigation, with results expected imminently.

Why the administration switch matters

Antitrust cases usually die with a new White House. That this one survived tells you something about how both parties now view Big Tech leverage. Microsoft isn't just a software vendor — it's one of the federal government's largest technology suppliers, and the probe's inclusion of large government contracts gives the FTC a procurement angle as well as a competition one.

There's also a timing angle. Azure reportedly passed $100 billion in annual revenue in fiscal 2026 and holds roughly 21% of global cloud infrastructure (Synergy Research, Q1 2026), behind AWS at 28% and ahead of Google Cloud at 14%. Investors are already asking whether Big Tech's cloud and AI spending can keep justifying itself — a forced unwinding of licensing lock-in would hit the most profitable part of the machine.

What comes next for the Microsoft antitrust probe

The realistic outcomes, roughly in order of likelihood:

• A consent decree forcing Microsoft to loosen licensing terms and unwind the Listed Provider restrictions — the classic FTC playbook.
• A narrowing of the case to specific practices, with the rest quietly dropped.
• A fine big enough to make headlines, small enough not to change behavior.
• The case withers on the vine if FTC staff can't build the evidence — but the fresh round of subpoenas suggests that isn't the direction of travel.

The industry can keep arguing about whether the Azure tax is a legitimate licensing model or a toll booth built on monopoly power. With regulators on both sides of the Atlantic circling, the probe just made it an official question — under a president nobody expected to ask it.