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Microsoft has offered\u00a0concessions to EC competition regulators in the hopes of smoothing the way for its planned acquisition of LinkedIn. It announced the $26.2 billion deal this\u00a0June<\/a>.<\/p>\n Reuters<\/a>\u00a0reports the development follows a meeting between the Commission and Microsoft executives last week at which the EC expressed concerns.<\/p>\n An EC spokesperson confirmed it has received \u201ca commitments proposal\u201d from Microsoft but declined to comment further.<\/p>\n Commitments, in EC antitrust nomenclature, refers to\u00a0remedies a company can offer if the Commission has concerns a\u00a0merger\/acquisition may significantly affect competition. These\u00a0can include proposing certain modifications to the project to\u00a0guarantee continued competition on the market.<\/p>\n A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment on what\u00a0concessions\u00a0it is offering. Nor would it comment more generally on the big data competition issue. But the spokesman did point to this blog<\/a>, written by competition lawyer Stephen Kinsella<\/a>\u00a0(whose firm has advised Microsoft on a range of antitrust issues), which sets out arguments against\u00a0big-data-related competition concerns as a blocker to\u00a0the Microsoft-LinkedIn\u00a0acquisition.<\/p>\n Kinsella\u2019s position is the big data competition concern essentially pivots on the question of whether a data set can be \u201cunmatched\u201d. \u201cUnless there is convincing evidence that a particular data set is genuinely both non-replicable and uncontestable, it would place an unreasonable burden on competition enforcers if they were always obliged to analyse the impact on some rather nebulous \u201cdata market\u201d,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n Complaints that the LinkedIn acquisition might make it difficult for Microsoft\u2019s competitors to launch future services are are dismissed by Kinsella\u00a0as moving into \u201cthe realm of an \u201cinnovation offence\u201d\u201d \u2014 where\u00a0regulators would be tackling, in his words, \u201cspeculative impact\u201d and \u201cthe levels of abstraction introduce too much uncertainty into the merger review process\u201d.<\/p>\n Clearly Microsoft hopes the Commission will come to similar conclusions. The majority of competition cases are cleared unconditionally by the EC, so the Microsoft-Linkedin deal is already in a minority \u2014 although the EC spokesman said\u00a0it\u00a0also has\u00a0\u201cmany cases\u201d where parties submit remedies at this stage as they seek to satisfy\u00a0regulator concerns.<\/p>\n EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager has raised concerns about\u00a0whether big data players\u2019 data holdings can impact competition for more than a year now, warning at the start of this year:<\/a>\u00a0\u201cIf\u00a0a\u00a0company\u2019s use of\u00a0data is so bad for competition that it outweighs the\u00a0benefits,\u00a0we may have to step in to restore\u00a0a level playing field.\u201d<\/p>\n Marc Benioff, chief executive officer of Salesforce.com \u2014 which\u00a0also made a bid for\u00a0LinkedIn \u2014 has been one of the most\u00a0vocal competitors opposing the acquisition<\/a>, arguing Microsoft will use LinkedIn\u2019s database\u00a0of ~430 million professional profiles of users to \u201cblock competition\u201d.<\/p>\n For its part,\u00a0Microsoft has said<\/a> it wants to integrate LinkedIn data into its existing software programs, such as\u00a0Outlook email, Skype messaging and Office\u2019s suite of productivity apps \u2014 combining the social graph of\u00a0the professional network with data held within\u00a0Microsoft users\u2019 emails, calendars and comms in order to enable new utility and functionality.\u00a0Such as\u00a0\u201ca LinkedIn newsfeed that serves up articles based on the project you are working on and Office suggesting an expert to connect with via LinkedIn to help with a task you\u2019re trying to complete\u201d.<\/p>\n It has also said it wants to apply machine learning\/AI on top of that mix to, in the words of one Microsoft exec, Scott Guthrie<\/a>, \u201ccreate the ultimate selling tool, the ultimate customer support tool\u201d. So another driver for the LinkedIn acquisition is its vast social graph\u00a0dataset as a pure \u2018raw material\u2019 for training the machine learning models Microsoft\u00a0will need to build a next generation of smarter software.<\/p>\n AI\u2019s need\u00a0for data\u00a0to create new products likely helps explain the hefty price-rag on the LinkedIn acquisition. But it remains to be seen how EU regulators will weigh up the competition implications\u00a0of any such LinkedIn-data-enabled future Microsoft products.<\/p>\n The new deadline for the EC\u2019s\u00a0decision on the acquisition is\u00a0December 6<\/span><\/span>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Featured Image: StockStudio<\/a>\/Shutterstock<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/x4ujAoEeHNI\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Microsoft has offered\u00a0concessions to EC competition regulators in the hopes of smoothing the way for its planned acquisition of LinkedIn. It announced the $26.2 billion deal this\u00a0June. 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