LONDON (AP) — European Union regulators have accepted Microsoft's proposed changes to Teams, resolving a long-running antitrust investigation that targeted the company's messaging and videoconferencing app.
The European Commission said in a statement Friday that Microsoft's final commitments to unbundle Teams from its Office software suite, including further tweaks following a market test in May and June, are enough to satisfy competition concerns.
The legally binding commitments will remain in force for up to 10 years and allow the company to avoid a potentially hefty fine.
“We appreciate the dialogue with the Commission that led to this agreement, and we turn now to implementing these new obligations promptly and fully,” Microsoft's vice president of European government affairs, Nanna-Louise Linde, said in a statement.
The Commission, acting on a complaint filed by Slack Technologies, accused Microsoft of “possibly abusive” practices after an investigation, saying that it was tying the Teams app to its widely used Office business software suite, which includes Word, Excel and Outlook.
Slack, now owned by Salesforce, makes popular workplace messaging software. Alfaview, a German maker of videoconferencing software, also filed a separate complaint.
Microsoft responded by proposing to make its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 software packages available at a discount without Teams, and to let customers switch to packages without Teams. The company also promised to make it easier for rival software to work with Teams and for users to move their data to competing products.
Salesforce President Sabastian Niles said the final decision sends a “clear message" that Microsoft’s ”anticompetitive" bundling of Teams has “harmed businesses, denied customers fair choice, and resulted in many years of lost competition.”
Teresa Ribera, the European Commission’s executive vice-president for competition affairs, said the announcement “opens up competition in this crucial market.”
The announcement comes a week after the Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s top antitrust authority, fined Google nearly 3 billion euros ($3.5 billion) because its ad-tech business breached competition rules, prompting President Donald Trump to threaten retaliation.
European Union flags flap in the wind outside EU headquarters in Brussels, Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)
FILE - The logo of Microsoft is seen outside its French headquarters in Issy-les-Moulineaux, outside Paris, on May 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)
MANILA, Philippines (AP) — The southern Philippines once drew small numbers of foreign militants aligned with al-Qaida or the Islamic State group to train in a secessionist conflict involving minority Muslims in the largely Catholic nation.
That backdrop prompted an investigation this week by Australian and Filipino into a recent trip to the southern Philippine region of Mindanao by the father and son accused of gunning down 15 people at Sydney’s Bondi Beach on Sunday.
Australian police said the attack was inspired by the Islamic State group. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Tuesday the IS link assessment was based on evidence obtained, including “the presence of Islamic State flags in the vehicle that has been seized.”
The Bureau of Immigration in Manila said Tuesday that the suspects stayed in the Philippines from Nov. 1 to Nov. 28 with the southern city of Davao as their final destination before flying back to Australia.
Philippine National Security Adviser Eduardo Año told The Associated Press without elaborating on Thursday that the suspected gunmen stayed in a budget hotel in downtown Davao city and there was no indication that the two received any training for the attack in the Philippines.
“There is no valid report or confirmation that the two received any form of military training while in the country and no evidence supports such a claim at present,” Año, a former military chief of staff, said in a statement. He said that "the duration of their stay would not have allowed for any meaningful or structured training.”
Here is a look at the details of Islamic militancy in the southern Philippines:
Davao is one of the key cities on the island of Mindanao from which travelers can access interior provinces, which have a history of Muslim rebel attacks in the past.
Centuries of colonialism by the Spanish, the United States and Filipino Christian settlers turned Muslims into a minority group in resource-rich Mindanao, the southern third of the archipelago that has seen decades of intermittent but bloody conflicts over land, resources and political power.
Since the 1970s, about 150,000 combatants and civilians have died in the southern Philippines while development was stunted in the country's poorest region. Western and Asian governments feared the tenacious insurgencies could help foster Islamic extremism in Southeast Asia.
Among the foreign militants who have sought sanctuary in Mindanao was Umar Patek, an Indonesian and leading member of Jemaah Islamiyah, a network linked to al-Qaida. He was convicted of helping make explosives used in the 2002 nightclub bombing in Bali, Indonesia, that killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists including 88 Australians. He was arrested in Pakistan in 2011, according to Philippine security officials.
The Philippines government and Muslim separatists signed a peace pact in 1996 that allowed thousands of rebels to return to their communities in Mindanao and retain their firearms.
A separate peace agreement signed in 2014 provided broader Muslim autonomy in exchange for the gradual deactivation of thousands of fighters. The pact turned some of the fiercest rebel commanders into administrators of a Muslim autonomous region called Bangsamoro.
More importantly, it turned the rebel front into guardians against the Islamic State group and its effort to gain a foothold in Mindanao.
At least four smaller groups broke off from the two largest Muslim rebel fronts that signed peace deals. The groups included the violent Abu Sayyaf, which would be blacklisted as a terror organization by the U.S. and the Philippines for mass kidnappings for ransom, beheadings and deadly bombings.
Most Abu Sayyaf commanders, who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group, were killed in battle, including a 2017 siege of southern Marawi, a city in Mindanao, by Filipino forces backed by U.S. and Australian surveillance aircraft.
Decades of military offensives have considerably weakened Abu Sayyaf and other armed groups and there has been no indication of any presence of foreign militants in the southern Philippines after the last two groups were “neutralized” in 2023, according to a senior Philippine security official and a confidential joint assessment by the military and police early last year that was seen by the AP.
Early this month, the Philippine army reported troops killed a suspected bomb maker and leader of Dawlah Islamiyah-Hassan, a group linked to IS, in southern Maguindanao del Sur province.
Sidney Jones, a U.S.-based analyst who has studied Islamic militant movements in Southeast Asia, said that given such militant setbacks it was hard to see why the suspected Bondi Beach attackers would want to train in Mindanao.
“The level of violence in Mindanao is high, but for the last three years, it’s almost all been linked to elections, clan feuds, or other sources,” Jones said. “If I were a would-be ISIS fighter, the Philippines would not have been my top destination.”
A police vehicle passes by a budget hotel in downtown Davao City, southern Philippines on Wednesday Dec. 17, 2025, as they assist investigations on where Bondi beach suspects reportedly stayed while in the country in November. (AP Photo/Manman Dejeto)
The coffin of Rabbi Eli Schlanger, a victim in the Bondi Beach mass shooting, is escorted out of a synagogue after his funeral service in Bondi on Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2025, in Sydney, Australia. (AP Photo/Mark Baker, Pool)
Relatives of Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who was killed in the Bondi shootings, react over his coffin during his funeral at Synagogue in Bondi, Sydney, Wednesday, Dec.17, 2025. (Hollie Adams/Pool Photo via AP)
The coffin of Rabbi Yaakov Levitan, a victim in the Bondi Beach mass shooting, is carried into a chapel for his funeral in Sydney, Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)
Rabbi Yehoram Ulman, father-in-law of Rabbi Eli Schlanger, a victim in the Bondi Beach mass shooting, speaks at his funeral at a synagogue in Bondi on Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2025, in Sydney, Australia. (AP Photo/Mark Baker, Pool)
