The United Kingdom's antitrust regulator is concerned that Microsoft's blockbuster purchase of Activision Blizzard could create a monopoly in the nascent cloud gaming space. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which began investigating the deal back in July, says that it's not yet reassured by the promises Microsoft has made to get the deal done. It feels that, once Activision is a part of Microsoft, the Xbox maker could use its "control over popular games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft" to "harm rivals" by boxing them out of access to popular titles. Microsoft has already publicly committed not to hoard exclusives, (and said that Actiblizz's library isn't all that anyway) but sweet words haven't appeased the officials. In a statement, it said that it was giving Microsoft and Activision five days to submit proposals that would address its concerns.

The EU has concluded Microsoft's $19.7 billion acquisition of Nuance doesn't pose competition concerns. Nuance gained renown for originally creating the backend of that little old virtual assistant called Siri (you might have heard of it?) The company has since continued to focus on building its speech recognition capabilities and has a number of solutions which span particular industries such as healthcare to general omni-channel customer experience services. Earlier this year, Microsoft decided Nuance is worth coughing up $19.7 billion for. As such large deals often do, the proposed acquisition caught the eyes of several global regulators.

The European Union has been digging into the competition implications of AI-powered voice assistants and other Internet of Things (IoT) connected technologies for almost a year. Today it's put out a first report discussing potential concerns that EU lawmakers say will help inform their wider digital policymaking in the coming years. A major piece of EU legislation introduced at the back of last year is already set to apply ex ante regulations to so-called'gatekeeper' platforms operating in the region, with a list of business practice'dos and don'ts' for powerful, intermediating platforms being baked into the forthcoming pan-EU Digital Services Act. The bloc's competition chief, Margrethe Vestager, has also had her eye on voice assistant AI technologies for a while -- raising concerns about the challenges being posed for user choice as far back as 2019, when she said her department was "trying to figure out how access to data will change the marketplace". The Commission took a concrete step last July when it announced a sectoral inquiry to examine IoT competition concerns in detail.