Proactive Investors - Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)'s President Brad Smith has spoken in favour of the UK market authority’s decision to bar the company’s merger with Activism Blizzard Inc, a Nasdaq-listed game developer, in a notable about-face from his previous criticism of the regulator.
The Competition and Markets Authority banned Microsoft from acquiring Activism in a US$68.7 billion deal earlier this year, before that decision was overturned last month following half a year’s worth of discussions.
Going partway to win the approve of the UK competition watchdog, Microsoft restructured the deal so that the gaming company's streaming rights would be divested to French company Ubisoft Entertainment.
The UK regulator's decision to intervene in the global deal, in which American tech major Microsoft would acquire a gaming company based in California, followed its request last year for Meta to lose its interest in Giphy.
At the time of the initial ban, Smith said that the decision would be “bad for Britain”. However, The Times reported on Friday that Smith had now said the competition authority acted with “clarity and decisiveness”.
“I feel that the CMA acted with clarity, with decisiveness, and with the kind of communication that you need in the world today, especially when decisions of such consequence are being made and they’re being made in many different national capitals at the same time,” Smith told the newspaper this week while speaking at the artificial intelligence summit at Bletchley Park.
The change in tone comes after Microsoft said yesterday that it has introduced a new Secure Future Initiative to battle cyber-crime and state-backed hacking. In a blog post yesterday, the company unveiled its plan to address cybersecurity using AI tools and building on its 2017 Digital Geneva Convention.
Senior personnel Charlie Bell, an executive vice president for security at the computer giant, and Scott Gurthrie and Rajesh Jha said they would safeguard identity management within the company’s products and double down on security software development and addressing vulnerabilities in the cloud.