Microsoft is filing a formal complaint with the European Union Commission accusing Google of abusing its position as the region's dominant search engine.

Microsoft is accusing Google of blocking competition in the search world, filing a formal complaint with EU anti-trust regulators.

It's an unusual twist. Microsoft is used to defending itself in the U.S. and in Europe against claims of anti-trust behavior, but this time it is the tech giant that is making the complaint.

The company claims Google is preventing some YouTube clips from showing up on other search engines and making it difficult for Microsoft's mobile phone software to show videos from YouTube. Google owns YouTube.

Other complaints: Google is blocking websites from using competing "search boxes",

and blocking access to content owned by book publishers which Google has copied and stored.

Google is already the subject of an EU investigation prompted by a Microsoft-owned company and says it welcomes the scrutiny.

Google dominates the search world, and controls more than 90 percent of the Internet search ad market in Europe. Microsoft created its search engine Bing less than two years ago in hopes of getting a piece of the global pie.