Europe has a new lobbying body, one that claims to have a self-stated mission to "improve competition, transparency and resilience" in the cloud computing sector.

To get the ball rolling, at launch, the Open Cloud Coalition (OCC) has 10 members from international and local cloud providers Centerprise International, Civo, Gigas, ControlPlane, DTP Group, Prolinx, Pulsant, Clairo and Room 101, the biggest player of which is Google. Some of the jobs by the collective will involve a research on the markets around clouds and present the information that one will get to regulators based in the European Union, as well as that from the U.K, on "engaging on conversations about competition and fair treatment in the market", reads part of a statement.

The launch comes hours after Microsoft's deputy general counsel Rima Alaily preempted the announcement, publishing a blog post accusing Google of conducting a "shadow campaign" to influence cloud regulation in Europe. Alaily called the new organization an "astroturf group organized by Google," adding that the search giant had "gone through great lengths to obfuscate its involvement, funding and control" by using smaller European cloud providers as the face of the coalition.

The OCC is broadly comparable to another industry trade organization called the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE), which launched in 2017 and has Amazon's AWS as its flagship member alongside several dozen smaller players. In fact, the OCC was a direct response to an agreement Microsoft reached with some members of CISPE on not pursuing an antitrust complaint against a licensing change it had made in 2019 that made its enterprise software more expensive to run on competitors' cloud services.

With reports that a $22 million payment along with promises made to it that would facilitate Microsoft software operation on the clouds of even smaller providers easier, this has led to Google submitting its complaint in turn to the European Commission, accusing it of anti-competitive practices through licensing forces companies onto its Azure clouds.

It's an apt time. The European Commission is scheduled to welcome a new Commission into its office, and the UK is also carrying out a detailed investigation into vendor lock-in practices of cloud market. AWS and Microsoft have come under scrutiny since the former is currently a leader in the market.

Heading the Coalition is Nicky Stewart, public sector director of UK cloud hosting company Civo. He says that as the norm, businesses have begun to find themselves increasingly "trapped in restrictive agreements, facing high costs and barriers" when trying to switch providers.

The OCC is committed to reversing this trend by promoting a more competitive and flexible market and driving open standards adoption, Stewart said in a statement.

Microsoft claims the largest benefactor of funding is actually Google, yet DGA Group, this "consulting firm" hired to manage the recruiting of Coalition members, was not allowed to release data on any single member's contributions. DGA still claims, however, the aggregate figure will be submitted to the EU Transparency Register.