Tech giant Microsoft will stop offering Teams app services as well as the Office suite in Europe to avoid antitrust penalties from regulators, Ap News reports.

The company also said it would take steps to make it easier for competing products to work with its software.

“Today we are announcing proactive changes that we hope will start to address these concerns in a meaningful way, even while the European Commission’s investigation continues and we cooperate with it,” Microsoft’s vice president of European government affairs, Nanna-Louise Linde, said in a blog post.

News of Microsoft’s decision comes a month after the European Union’s Executive Commission launched a formal investigation into concerns that tying Teams to Office gives the company an unfair advantage over competitors.

“We take note of Microsoft’s announcement. We have no further comment to make”, a Commission spokesperson said.

This is all due to an alert filed in 2020 by Slack Technologies, the reason for the investigation.

According to Slack, Microsoft is abusing its dominant market position to eliminate competition – in violation of EU laws – by illegally combining Teams with the Office suite, which includes Word, Excel and Outlook.

Linde also said the changes in question were made to be able to address EU concerns that customers should be able to buy Office without Teams at a lower price and that “we need to do more to facilitate interoperability” with competing communication and collaboration software.

The changes will take effect on Oct. 1 in the 30-nation European Economic Area and Switzerland.

Microsoft is not the only company under pressure from Brussels because of concerns about their market dominance. The Commission is also investigating Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook and Instagram.

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