Microsoft has failed to win permission to appeal to the UK Supreme Court in the long-running legal spat with ValueLicensing after the Court of Appeal refused its application.

The US megacorp was challenging a November 2025 ruling in ValueLicensing’s favour that VL may resell pre-owned software licenses. That judgement was unambiguous, but Microsoft said at the time that it would seek permission to appeal.

That request was rejected last week in blunt terms. No reasons were given for the refusal, just the words “It is ordered that the application is refused.”

It isn’t quite the end of the road. Microsoft could apply to the Supreme Court itself, but it would need to file within 28 days and show a compelling reason why the Court of Appeal was wrong to refuse its appeal.

Things are looking dicey for Microsoft in the case that started in 2021 when ValueLicensing sued Microsoft for £270 million over claims that the Windows maker choked off the supply of surplus Office licenses. Microsoft denied any wrongdoing and Instead attempted to reframe the case as a copyright dispute. The UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal rejected Microsoft’s arguments and a subsequent appeal.

A recently published Consent Order adds to the pressure. It demands documents from past and present Microsoft bosses, including a potentially explosive internal deck titled “Second-Hand Software Presentation” (SHS).

The contents of the file are unknown, but the Consent Order refers to it as a “Known Adverse Document.” It dates back to 2013, a few years after Office 365 was launched. The order also asks why Microsoft waited until the end of 2025 to disclose the document’s existence, a few years after Office 365 launched.

To add a little more spice, Alexander Wolfson is listed as an intervener on the appeal refusal. He is the proposed class representative in a separate claim filed on behalf of millions of UK customers seeking between £1.3 billion to £3.5 billion in compensation from Microsoft over its conduct regarding pre-owned licenses.

ValueLicensing and Microsoft declined to comment on the latest development.

Appeals aside, the next stage will be a Witness Statement from Microsoft explaining who knew what and when, followed by further disclosure.

The UK’s competition watchdog wants to designate Microsoft with strategic market status (SMS) in business software, allowing the regulator it to intervene to level the playing field, and says it is considering other areas for investigation.

Regulators around the world are watching to see what the UK decides in this case, with bodies such as the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the European Commission mulling similar actions.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is opening a consultation on whether to tag the Redmond software giant with strategic market status in respect of its portfolio of business software applications.

This follows an investigation the regulator started back in May into Microsoft’s software portfolio including Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Teams, plus its security, server and operating systems. The watchdog is also probing whether Microsoft enjoys a position of “substantial and entrenched market power” through the suite of software that could be seen as stifling competition and harming buyer choice.

It lays out its proposed decision in a document and is inviting comments that must be submitted by November 13. The CMA will make its final decision by February 13, 2027.

New research by Pax8 has criticised UK businesses for building AI faster than governance can keep up, with a quarter (24%) of SMBs having discovered unauthorised AI tools operating within the business in the past six months.

Two in five (39%) have also experienced unexpectedly high AI bills, implying that the visibility across their AI consumption isn’t sufficient.

But with the pressure to adopt AI at an all-time high, UK businesses could continue to be rushed into rash decisions without thinking out the fundamentals first.

Even though shadow AI is apparently widespread, just one in four (23%) UK businesses have a formal, documented review process for internally built AI, compared with around a third in Germany (32%) and the US (36%).

In light of that, only around half (54%) of UK SMBs are developing their own AI, putting them way behind the likes of the US (81%).

British businesses are also struggling on the cost management front, with a tiny 12% having dedicated AI budgets. A further 19% couldn’t even distinguish AI spend from other tech spend, leaving just 16% of UK SMBs confident in their abilities to determine AI’s ROI – around a third of the number of businesses in Sweden (45%) that feel confident in doing so.

Looking ahead, security concerns remain the most cited barrier to adoption, but Pax8 frames the current state of AI adoption as a major opportunity for software vendors and IT service providers. Rather than creating an action point for businesses, who are the consumers in this instance, the report implies that the providers have a greater responsibility to reassure their users with additional visibility, security and governance controls, and cost management options.

“These findings highlight the importance of trusted businesses that can help SMBs bring agents, workflows, data and tools together as a connected intelligence layer,” said EMEA CEO Harald Nuij.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has opened a fresh investigation into Microsoft, this time over how the company is marketing its Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscription plans.

A cursory glance at the probe highlights that the CMA is trying to prevent Microsoft from sneaking in Copilot and AI features as justification for recent subscription price hikes. A closer look at the investigation displays a pattern of friction Microsoft runs into with regulators regarding its subscription practices, automatic renewals, and software bundling almost every time it adjusts its services.

The CMA made the investigation public on July 29, 2026, though the case itself was opened two days earlier. According to the CMA’s case announcement, the price gap between plans is concrete. The Classic Microsoft 365 Personal plan costs £59.99 a year, compared to £84.99 a year for the Copilot-equipped version, a difference of £25 annually. The Family plan costs £79.99 a year for Classic versus £104.99 a year with Copilot bundled in.

The CMA’s announcement hinges on Microsoft’s change in January 2025, when the company automatically added new features such as Copilot to existing Microsoft 365 plans with no increase in fees for the remainder of the subscription period. Unfortunately, once the plans were up for renewal, customers who were not paying attention were re-enrolled into higher-priced plans. Customers who were paying attention could avoid the bait-and-switch by selecting a ‘Classic’ plan or cancelling during the re-enrolment period.

This price change was covered when it first happened in February 2025, and even then, Microsoft would not directly attribute the increase to Copilot in their own communications. Personal plans jumped from $6.99 to $9.99 a month in the US, and Family plans went from $9.99 to $12.99, with the Classic option only showing for existing subscribers who knew to look for it during cancellation.

CMA regulators are now examining whether Microsoft provided adequate messaging for customers to understand what changes occurred and how much more they were going to pay despite spending months using features that were initially presented as free.

As Senior Director for Consumer Protection, Hayley Fletcher puts it, “When a business changes its subscription plans, customers need clear and timely information about their options.”

Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) has been told to urgently overhaul an IT estate so dysfunctional that officers say they are fighting serious organised crime despite the technology rather than because of it.

A new report by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) has delivered a bruising verdict on the National Crime Agency’s tech, concluding that the systems underpinning Britain’s fight against organised crime are no longer up to the job.

The criticism lands despite inspectors otherwise finding much to like. The NCA was graded “Good” in several operational areas, including tackling serious and organised crime and working with partners. But throughout the report, inspectors repeatedly return to technology as a fundamental weakness running through the entire organisation.

“The NCA’s IT infrastructure isn’t fit for purpose,” the report states. Inspectors backed that assessment with a long list of examples, from officers manually re-entering data and sharing information by hand to teams relying on spreadsheets and other workarounds due to a lack of confidence in official systems.

According to the report, around 70 percent of critical IT incidents each month are linked to that technical debt, the result of years spent prioritising short-term fixes over long-term modernisation.

Officers told inspectors they did not trust the agency’s systems, while others described technology as a major drag on productivity. One interviewee summed up the mood: “IT is a blocker; we achieve in spite of it.”

Another was even less flattering. “When I started in policing 15 to 20 years ago, I had better technology than I do in the NCA.”

The report paints a picture familiar to anyone who has worked in a large public sector IT environment. Officers told inspectors they routinely enter the same information multiple times, rely on manual processes, and manually transfer data to external partners. Some said the agency lacks even a basic personnel directory, making it difficult to find the right colleague when they need help.

While the NCA operates a corporate system called ATLAS CM, inspectors heard that officers are using as many as 50 different case management methods across the agency, including spreadsheets and other manual workarounds, often due to a lack of confidence in the official platform.

The agency’s security architecture has also produced its own headaches. Because data sits across multiple government security classifications, many officers reportedly require at least two laptops to do their jobs. Inspectors spoke to some staff who were using four separate machines and said they witnessed the resulting inefficiencies first-hand.

In a separate HMICFRS inspection published last year, inspectors found the agency was still relying on around 260 legacy IT systems more than a decade after beginning a project to modernise IT, with technical debt consuming roughly 80 percent of entire IT budget.

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.

Microsoft has been hit with a fresh probe into its business software ecosystem by the British competition regulator, as Europe steps up its efforts to diversify tech stacks and increase digital sovereignty.

The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority announced on Tuesday it is launching a “strategic market status (SMS) investigation” into the tech giant’s suite of enterprise software, starting in May.

Hundreds of thousands of U.K. businesses and public sector organisations use Microsoft’s business software, which includes Windows, Word, Excel, Teams and AI platform Copilot, every day, the regulator said in a statement.

“An SMS designation would enable us to tackle remaining concerns around Microsoft’s licensing practices in cloud and would also enable us to ensure a level playing field as AI is rapidly embedded into everyday business software tools,” CMA CEO Sarah Cardell said in a statement.

Microsoft is committed to working “quickly and constructively” to address the issues identified by the CMA, said the company’s president, Brad Smith.

“We recognise that the CMA will continue to review and assess additional issues relating to our products and services, including in the business software market,” Smith added in a statement.

Google and Apple were designated with SMS by the CMA in October with regard to their mobile platforms. The status is not a finding of wrongdoing, but it means that the companies must adhere to rules designed to prevent abuse of dominant positions.