Two big battles Microsoft’s legal team is facing are being waged not in the courtroom but in the court of public opinion by the company’s corporate vice president and deputy general counsel, Rima Alaily.
The Microsoft lawyer, who joined the company as an antitrust specialist 16 years ago, publicly released a letter she wrote to the Federal Trade Commission’s inspector general on Dec. 3 asking the IG to look into whether the agency acted improperly by leaking word of an investigation it was conducting into the company.
Microsoft executives had no idea their company was being investigated and facing an information demand until it read about it last month in a Bloomberg News report, Alaily said in her letter to Andrew Katsaros, the FTC’s IG.
“Microsoft learned of this information demand, like the rest of the world, through the Bloomberg story,” she said.
The agency is reportedly looking to see if the company violated antitrust laws with its cloud computing and software licensing bundles, cybersecurity offerings and AI products.
“References in the story to ‘people familiar with the information request’ strongly suggest that the details included in the Bloomberg story come from within the FTC,” she said.
If that’s the case, the agency is violating its own ethics rules, she said. “While this leak is an unfortunate development for Microsoft, it is more problematic for the integrity of the FTC’s processes,” she said.
The letter isn’t the first time Alaily has trained a public spotlight on matters that in-house lawyers typically manage behind the scenes. In October, she published a lengthy essay calling out Google for waging what she called a clandestine campaign to tar Microsoft’s cloud business.
“It seems Google [is trying to] distract from the intense regulatory scrutiny Google is facing around the world by discrediting Microsoft,” she said.
In that essay, Alaily pointed to Google’s role in creating the Open Cloud Coalition, a group that opened its doors last month to persuade European regulators to go after Microsoft for the way it licenses its cloud software. Alaily said she heard from the head of a small European cloud provider that the organization is effectively an arm of Google.
“One of the companies approached, who ultimately declined, told us that the organization will be directed and largely funded by Google for the purpose of attacking Microsoft’s cloud computing business in the European Union and the United Kingdom,” she said.
She also accused Google of being the main funder of another organization, the U.S.-based Coalition for Fair Software Licensing, which is also attacking Microsoft’s cloud business.
All of this, she said, is part of an effort to put Microsoft under a regulatory microscope at a time when Google is under siege for antitrust violations in the U.S., U.K. and European Union.
“Google is facing a reckoning,” she said. “Never in the past two decades have Google’s search, digital advertising, and mobile app store monopolies faced such a concerted and determined threat as they do today. By our count, there are at least 24 antitrust investigations against Google in the leading digital markets around the world. At a time when Google should be focused on addressing legitimate questions about its business, it is instead turning its vast resources towards tearing down others.”
It’s not clear whether Alaily’s efforts to make public what’s going on behind the scenes will help Microsoft from a legal standpoint, and the company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But it’s having an impact in the battle over public perceptions.
“Inspired by your courage to make this public,” John Jurata, an antitrust partner at Dechert, told Alaily in a LinkedIn response to her FTC letter.
“Microsoft's transparency behind these issues is a big part of what makes them so successful in dealing with complex investigations and [I’m] rooting for you,” Jennifer Ennis Bollen, a senior intellectual property paralegal at Perkins Coie, said on LinkedIn.
In introducing her Google essay in October, Alaily said she’s trying to make transparency a signature of her in-house work, “even when that might make things more complicated for Microsoft,” she said. “It’s not comfortable or natural for me to pen something critical of someone else, but in this case [concerning Google], I think it’s important because it concerns me when someone attacks us and, I believe, does so dishonestly.”
