Allstate Insurance Company has accused Broadcom of haphazardly issuing audits against it because the insurance firm decided not to renew its contracts with VMware and CA Technologies.

The allegations were made in relation to a lawsuit that VMware filed against Allstate in December 2025, according to The Register. In the complaint, Broadcom alleges that Allstate failed to comply with license audits, which Broadcom claims its contract with Allstate requires.

In a June 12 filing, Allstate suggested that Broadcom issued the audits in response to Allstate deciding to end business with its companies. Allstate’s statement reads:

The UK’s Court of Appeal has dismissed Microsoft’s appeal against a ruling that ValueLicensing (VL) can resell pre-owned software licences.

The judgement, handed down July 7, follows a ruling by the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) in November that customers could resell their licenses, even if Office contained clip-art.

In 2021, VL filed a claim accusing Microsoft of stifling the market for pre-owned on-prem software licenses, alleging the US biz baked restrictive clauses into its contracts – essentially, better subscription deals for customers who didn’t resell old licenses. VL sought £270 million in damages; Microsoft denied wrongdoing.

The case later took a turn, when Microsoft attempted to reframe it as a copyright dispute. VL was leaning on the EU’s UsedSoft ruling, which established that secondhand software licenses could legally be resold. Microsoft changed tack and countered that Office’s icons and help files made it a creative work, and thus covered by the Copyright and Information Society Directive rather than the software licensing rules UsedSoft addressed. Microsoft also argued that licenses it had sold in bulk (for example, a 1,000-seat purchase) couldn’t legally be broken up and resold piecemeal by VL.

The CAT rejected both arguments and ruled unanimously for ValueLicensing. Microsoft filed an appeal, and that appeal has now failed.

The judgement is unambiguous on both counts. On copyright, the Court of Appeal agreed with the CAT that Microsoft’s reasoning would lead to “odd results.”

“It would mean that all that was necessary to avoid the effect of UsedSoft would be to incorporate some icons or clip art with the program,” the judgement noted.

As for the subdivision of volume licenses, again, the Court of Appeal sided with the CAT and dismissed Microsoft’s appeal: there’s nothing wrong with VL’s approach.

VL’s Jonathan Horley said in a statement: “I am delighted that the Court of Appeal has given such a clear judgement in ValueLicensing’s favour on both of Microsoft’s appeals. The judgement agreed with all the main conclusions of the CAT on both rulings under appeal as well as clarifying the overall legality of our business model.”

Horley pointed out that none of Microsoft’s arguments succeeded and VL now intends to pursue its compensation claim.

“We are considering the consequences of the Court of Appeal’s judgement for Microsoft’s defence to our claim and will focus in the coming weeks and months on the key procedural steps leading up to a liability trial,” he added.

A Microsoft spokesperson said: “We respectfully disagree with the court’s decision and will seek permission to appeal. Today’s decision does not address ValueLicensing’s core complaint that we gave customers the option to apply the value of their licenses for older products to new cloud subscriptions rather than selling them to third parties.

“We continue to believe that was both legal and the right thing to do. Helping our customers move to the cloud improves productivity and security.”

Justin Turner KC, the judge presiding over ValueLicensing’s claim, is also overseeing Alexander Wolfson’s collective action against Microsoft. Wolfson was granted permission to intervene in the appeal on March 30, and the judgement noted that “the intervener’s position was essentially supportive of VL’s case.”

That potentially makes today’s dismissal significant well beyond VL’s own claim. The Wolfson collective action, bolstered by this ruling, could expose Microsoft to liability running into the billions, dwarfing the hundreds of millions at stake in VL’s original claim.

T-Mobile is asking a New York court to rule that Broadcom was contractually obligated to continue supporting its VMware perpetual licenses.

In its complaint, T-Mobile said it has tens of thousands of virtual machines using VMware software across approximately 303,140 CPU cores. It also said that it was migrating off VMware but noted the time-consuming and technical challenges involved in migrating over 1,000 applications.

It filed its lawsuit, which was first reported by The Register, in the Supreme Court of the State of New York in August 2025.

The mobile company claimed that in 2023, it bought perpetual VMware licenses, plus two years of support with the option to buy a third year. But after Broadcom bought VMware, it stopped sales of VMware perpetual licenses in favour of subscriptions and started bundling VMware products into a few, more expensive bundles.

When T-Mobile tried to extend support for a third year for $5,288,398.45, Broadcom wouldn’t allow it, per an August 2025 filing from T-Mobile. A Broadcom representative reportedly told T-Mobile via email: “Broadcom announced end of available of all perpetual products, which includes Stated Out Year Renewals for perpetual support.”

A judge granted T-Mobile an injunction that allowed it to receive support services from October 2025 through August 3, 2026, for $5.28 million, plus the posting of a $500,000 undertaking.

Now, T-Mobile is seeking a declaration that it was entitled to renew support services and further relief as the court deems necessary.

At one point, T-Mobile wanted support so badly that it offered $20 million for two years of software updates and support services. The company cited litigation costs and “mitigating interruption and security risks to both the network and the business” as part of its reasoning.

In a filing last month, Broadcom claimed that it has incurred $24 million in costs to provide T-Mobile with support for six VMware products and to assign it three dedicated support account managers. T-Mobile responded that it doesn’t use three of the six named products and has opened only two service cases this year.

The case is similar to a privately settled case that Broadcom had with AT&T over VMware support and to an ongoing case with Tesco.

Broadcom previously argued that T-Mobile’s case stands out because T-Mobile waited a long time before trying to extend support.

“Thousands upon thousands have successfully migrated to subscription,” a Broadcom lawyer said in an October 2025 hearing, per the publication. “T-Mobile is the outlier here that is in litigation. … Thousands upon thousands of customers have already transferred under these sorts of provisions and accepted and understood that end of availability applies.”

However, it’s worth pointing out that the financial and technical burdens involved in suing a conglomerate like Broadcom. Those challenges may have deterred organisations, especially smaller ones, from getting into litigation over VMware.

Neither T-Mobile nor Broadcom has publicly commented on the case.

Tesco are moving 40,000 server workloads off of VMware amid “abusive conduct” from Broadcom, recent legal filings claim.

Tesco filed a lawsuit in the UK’s High Court against Broadcom alleging breach of contract last year. According to a September report from The Register, the lawsuit claimed that in January 2021, Tesco bought perpetual licenses for VMware’s vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation, a subscription to VMware Tanzu, plus support services until 2026, with the option to extend support for four additional years.

But when Broadcom took over VMware in November 2023, it would not honour the deal and instead tried to get Tesco to pay “excessive and inflated prices for virtualisation software for which Tesco has already paid” and would not allow it to buy support services for its perpetually licensed software without buying “duplicative subscription-based licenses for those same Software products,” the initial complaint read.

Tesco, which reported 73.7 billion pounds (about $98.7 billion) in revenue in its fiscal year 2026, has since started migrating away from VMware and Broadcom’s mainframe products, according to late-May court filings.

In January, Broadcom stopped supporting Tesco’s VMware products, Tesco said, and Tesco has been paying for third-party support since. In its initial filing, Tesco also said that Broadcom refused to upgrade software or provide all security updates to customers without subscriptions.

One of Tesco’s recent filings reads:

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is taking a closer look at Microsoft’s business software empire, launching a strategic market status investigation into the company’s ecosystem.

The probe, which is the fourth since the UK’s digital markets competition regime came into force last year, will determine whether Microsoft should be designated as having strategic market status, which would allow the CMA to implement interventions to support competition.

In March, the CMA announced that the investigation was coming. The regulator was concerned that Microsoft’s software licensing practices were reducing competition in the cloud.

In the most recent announcement, the CMA said it had “heard that UK customers may not always be able to effectively combine software from Microsoft with that of other providers, limiting their ability to get access to the best products at the most competitive prices.”

Microsoft is no stranger to regulatory friction. In 2025, it described calls from AWS and Google for the UK competition regulator to “intervene and constrain the price” it charges customers to run wares on those rivals’ cloud platforms as “extraordinary and unprecedented.”

Two year prior, Google branded Microsoft’s cloud software licensing a “tax” paid by customers as a penalty for not running Microsoft software on Azure infrastructure. It claims that Microsoft charges up to four times more, for example, to run Windows Server on GCP. AWS has previously moaned about this too.

As well as assessing whether Microsoft is using its position to limit customer choice, the CMA investigation “includes looking at how AI competitors are able to integrate with Microsoft’s business software, giving customers access to AI software across suppliers to best suit their needs.”

Microsoft is pushing Copilot AI into as many Microsoft 365 subscriptions as it can, even creating a new tier, E7, aimed specifically at AI services.

In a statement, Nicky Stewart, senior advisor to the Open Cloud Coalition – a trade association Microsoft previously dismissed as a Google lobby group – said:

“This investigation needs to be both rapid and conclusive. It must address Microsoft’s unfair licensing practices once and for all, giving the UK cloud market a level playing field and the confidence to innovate and invest for the long term.”

Readers should not expect results anytime soon. It took 21 months for the CMA to publish the results of an investigation into the UK cloud services market, in which it said Microsoft and AWS were using their dominance to harm UK cloud customers. It claimed Microsoft, for example, could have charged UK enterprise customers £500 million more annually to run its wares in AWS and Google clouds than they’d have paid to run them in Azure.

A key concern from that investigation – whether Microsoft’s software licensing practices were reducing competition in cloud services – has informed this one.

This latest inquiry must be completed within nine months, and a decision on designating Microsoft with SMS is scheduled to be reached by February 2027.

For its part, a Microsoft spokesperson said “We are committed to working quickly and constructively with the CMA to facilitate its review of the business software market.”

The investigation will be wide-ranging, encompassing productivity applications, operating systems, databases, and security software.

Sarah Cardell, Chief Executive of the CMA, said, “Our aim is to understand how these markets are developing, Microsoft’s position within them and to consider what, if any, targeted action may be needed to ensure UK organisations can benefit from choice, innovation and competitive prices.”

Authorities in the US, Europe, Brazil, South Africa and Japan are also closely monitoring Microsoft’s licensing policies.

A UK Competition Appeals Tribunal (CAT) has dismissed Microsoft’s objections to a collective action lawsuit brought by UK-based cloud licensees, clearing the way for trial.

The case seeks compensation for approximately 59,000 businesses and organisations over Microsoft’s pricing of Windows Server on Azure versus competing cloud platforms including AWS and Google Cloud – allegations that Microsoft charged less for the software on its own platform than on rivals’. If Microsoft loses, it could face liability of up to £2 billion (c $2.7 billion).

The CAT granted a Collective Proceedings Order (CPO) on an opt-out basis, and said in its judgement that the claim “comfortably passes” the reasonable prospect of success threshold. The CPO – expected to be published within weeks – will set a deadline for businesses to opt out, and may include directions for when hearings begin.

Microsoft’s protestations concerned funding and the merits of the case.

Lead claimant Dr Maria Luisa Stasi called the ruling “an important moment for thousands of organisations impacted by Microsoft’s conduct.”

She added: “For years, Microsoft’s practices have had real financial impact on both public and private organisations. I’m now looking forward to preparing for trial and getting their money back on their behalf.”

A spokesperson for Microsoft said: “We will pursue an appeal of the Tribunal’s decision because it failed to follow recent precedent from the Supreme Court on class action certifications. We also dispute the underlying allegations by the class representative, and today’s decision makes no final determination on those claims.”

The case, filed in December 2024, is one of several legal headaches for Microsoft in the UK. The company is separately appealing a CAT ruling over secondhand software sales in a claim brought by reseller ValueLicensing.

Jonathan Horley, boss at ValueLicensing, said of the class action case heading to trial: “However it pans out, it is very good that MS are being held to account over their strategic move to a subscription model.

“Over the last 15 years, in both the desktop and datacenter environments, VL believes that Microsoft has abused its dominant position to achieve that aim. I believe the Stasi and Wolfson claims are manifestations of that.”

Cloud provider Civo also welcomed the development. CEO Mark Boost said: “Ensuring a level playing field for all providers is essential to fostering innovation, expanding choice, and delivering the best outcomes for customers.”

Microsoft’s alleged licensing practices have drawn scrutiny across Europe and further afield – in 2024, the company settled with EU cloud vendor group CISPE with a payout and commitments to change its practices. CISPE had no comment to make on this latest development. In the same year, Google filed a complaint with the European Commission’s anti-trust team over the matter.

The FTC is examining if Microsoft’s cloud clout crosses the line, and authorities in Japan are investigating if the vendor has violated anti-monopoly laws.

Google and AWS have not commented on the CAT licensing ruling, which sends the case to trial.