To avoid a potential EU antitrust investigation and fine, Microsoft has proposed to charge different pricing for its Office package with and without its Teams software.

Since last year, when the European Commission received a complaint from Salesforce-owned workspace messaging platform Slack, Microsoft has been working to allay its concerns.

In 2020, Slack claimed that Microsoft had improperly incorporated Teams, a video and chat application for the workplace, into its Office product. In 2017, the American IT giant launched Teams in an effort to capture the lucrative and quickly expanding workplace collaboration industry.

According to the European Commission, Slack was not the only party to file a complaint.

Microsoft's competitors are being consulted by the EU antitrust monitor on its suggestion.

Slack claimed in the complaint that Microsoft forces Office customers to install the Teams software, prevents its uninstallation, and makes it impossible to collaborate with rivals.

Slack sought that the EU declare that Microsoft's Teams software must be sold separately from Office and not as part of an Office bundle.

In other antitrust-related developments, the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) concluded on March 31 that the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) had not met the deadline necessary in the procedure, ending a United Kingdom regulator's probe into Apple.

The CMA made the decision to look into the UK's app stores' distribution of cloud gaming services as well as the availability of mobile browsers and browser engines.

A little over two months ago, the German antitrust agency declared that it was looking into PayPal's user agreement as it may contain clauses that were anti-competitive and applicable to Germany.

Microsoft was fined $2.4 billion by the European Commission in the last ten years for actions that violated EU competition laws, such as tying or bundling two or more products together.