A European watchdog just accused Broadcom of something that goes well beyond typical licensing disputes: embedding what amounts to a kill switch inside VMware’s virtualization software, one that can automatically degrade or block a customer’s entire environment if they miss a compliance report by even a day.
The European Cloud Competition Observatory, which draws its membership from cloud infrastructure providers and customer organizations across Europe, laid out the claim in its latest report. Broadcom requires cloud providers to submit compliance reports every 180 days, and if they miss that window, the system reportedly triggers automated degradation or an outright block, rendering a company’s virtualization infrastructure non-functional. ECCO called it an “extraordinary and disproportionate” use of market power, and in the same breath raised real questions about how resilient European digital infrastructure actually is if a single missed deadline can take it down.
That’s just one piece of what earned Broadcom a “critical” rating, the worst on ECCO’s scale. Back in January, the company shut down its main VMware reseller program for European cloud providers without warning, cutting off access to virtualization services those providers had relied on for years, with no comparable alternative available. On top of that, ECCO flagged new Bring Your Own License terms that funnel customers toward a shrinking pool of certified hosts, along with license price increases CISPE members report running ten times or more above pre-Broadcom VMware pricing. Broadcom acquired VMware in 2023.
Meanwhile, SAP landed in less severe but still concerning territory, earning an “amber” rating over data access restrictions tied to agentic AI and a pricing shift toward capacity-based billing that ECCO says will make it markedly more expensive to run SAP services on any cloud besides SAP’s own. Smaller providers, in particular, stand to get squeezed hardest by that change.
Microsoft, by contrast, came out ahead this round. ECCO credited the company for harmonizing extended security update pricing across cloud providers regardless of which one a customer chooses, addressing a complaint CISPE raised earlier, and for joining new SME-focused cloud onboarding work under the European Cloud Accelerator. In other words, these ratings track behavior that keeps shifting, not a fixed reputation, so a supplier can move between them depending on what it actually does next.
