WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Google and Microsoft are tied.
Driven in part by pressure from lawmakers and regulators over the extraordinary power that the two technology companies exert over American life, the California-based search engine giant and the Washington-based software company are struggling to throw themselves under the bus.
Tensions between Microsoft Corp and Alphabet-owned Google have been simmering for a while, but the rivalry has become extraordinarily public in recent days, when executives from both companies have been put on the defensive from competing crises.
Google faces bipartisan complaints – and journalistic wrath – about its role in destroying the advertising industry’s media revenue, the subject of a congressional antitrust hearing on Friday.
Microsoft, for its part, faces scrutiny as to its role in consecutive cyber security breaches.
In the first, the same supposedly Russian hackers who compromised the Texas software company SolarWinds Corp also took advantage of Microsoft’s cloud software to hack into some of the company’s customers. The second, released on March 2, saw allegedly Chinese hackers abuse previously unknown vulnerabilities to sniff emails from Microsoft customers around the world.
Addressing lawmakers on Friday in an antitrust subcommittee of the House of Representatives Judiciary, Microsoft President Brad Smith should fire on Google, telling reporters that media organizations are being forced to “use the tools Google, operate on Google’s ad exchanges, contribute data to Google operations and pay Google’s money, ”according to excerpts from his testimony published by Axios.
Google responded, saying that “Microsoft’s newly discovered interest in attacking us comes in the wake of the SolarWinds attack and the moment they allowed tens of thousands of their customers – including US government agencies, NATO allies, banks, organizations nonprofits, telecommunications providers, utilities, police, fire and rescue units, hospitals and, presumably, news organizations – to be actively hacked through Microsoft’s top vulnerabilities.
Reporting by Raphael Satter, edited by Nick Zieminski