There's a message from ANSI for Microsoft, antitrust.

I'm David Brancaccio in New York. Published reports indicate federal regulators have opened a wide-ranging antitrust probe into Microsoft's business practices with special attention on the company's remote computing business, the cloud. Here's Marketplace's Nova Saffo.

David, neither side is talking publicly about this, but Bloomberg and the Associated Press are reporting that the FTC is looking at

how Microsoft bundles its cloud business with other offerings, such as AI, cybersecurity products, and

Windows software. And in some ways, this sounds like the Google case at the FTC, where the

agency has successfully so far challenged the company's use of its dominant position in mobile

operating software to allegedly limit competition in how people download or pay for apps. So it's all

about this notion of bundling offerings and allegedly keeping competitors out of ecosystems.

Now, the Google case was more about direct harm to consumers. Same thing with this Microsoft one?

Well, it could potentially be more expansive. I mean, think about cloud computing. It's come to occupy such a prominent place in business, the economy overall, government operations. I think of that crowd strike outage over the summer.

And one thing we know for certain is that the FTC has investigated cloud computing services

in general.

And of course, here we're talking about Microsoft, Amazon, Google specifically, and most

predominantly.

The FTC put out a report last year outlining concerns that cloud providers are potentially limiting competition, which is then degrading cybersecurity potentially because too many companies are reliant on too few providers, David.

All right, Nova, thank you.

Spending on new construction this fall running strong.

The increase in October was 4 tenths of a percent, but that is twice the forecast, private and residential construction, was nearly all of the growth. Public and commercial dipped. Marketplaces Kaylee Wells reports.

There's a short-term answer and a long-term answer. The long-term answer, supply and demand. We've still got a lot of remote workers, says Ani Ban Basu.

He's chief economist with the trade group Associated Builders and Contractors.

In many downtowns across the United States of America, the office vacancy rate is above 30%.

That frustrates construction of new space.

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