ITALY OPENS APPLE PROBE OVER ICLOUD

Italy's competition regulator has opened an investigation into whether Apple is illegally tilting the playing field in favour of iCloud over third-party cloud storage services. The probe, the first of its kind by the Italian watchdog under the DMA, will send its findings to the European Commission, which remains the sole enforcer of the bloc's digital competition rules.

At the heart of the case is a specific technical barrier. The authority says Apple does not allow alternative cloud services to use the iOS and iPadOS features that enable users to perform a full device backup. Without that access, third-party providers "may not be placed on an equal footing as Apple's iCloud", the regulator said in a statement. Under the Digital Markets Act, Apple must ensure that consumer cloud services can interoperate with iOS and iPadOS and have the same access as iCloud.

This is not a small complaint. Full device backup is one of the stickiest lock-in mechanisms in the Apple ecosystem. If only iCloud could pull every app, setting, and message thread off an iPhone and restore it intact, the cost of switching to a third-party cloud is not a subscription price but the loss of a core device-management feature. The DMA was written specifically to break that kind of bundling.

PATTERN OF RESISTANCE

The investigation lands in a well-worn groove. Apple has paid roughly $3 billion in fines for competition law breaches over the past couple of years, and it has rarely admitted wrongdoing in any of them. The company has said it would rather partially or wholly withdraw from a market than comply with regulator demands it considers unreasonable.

That posture is on display in another current standoff. Apple has not made its Apple Intelligence features available in the first developer beta of iOS 27 in EU countries. The EU wants Apple to give third-party AI services the same access to the iPhone as Siri, but Apple has refused on security and privacy grounds. Apple says the European Commission has not responded to its proposal for a compromise. The AI spat, and the cloud investigation is a separate docket. Still, they share a root cause: Apple's argument that full control over its platform is necessary for user safety, and regulators arguing that control is used to exclude competitors.

WHAT THE DMA ACTUALLY SAYS

The Digital Markets Act designates Apple's iOS as a gatekeeper platform. That designation carries specific obligations. For cloud services, the rules mandate that gatekeepers must allow alternative providers to interoperate with the same hardware and software features the gatekeeper's own service uses. The prohibition against self-preferencing is explicit and strict.

Italy's role here is as a preliminary investigator. The DMA allows individual member states to gather evidence and forward it to Brussels. The authority's findings "to support it in its role as sole DMA enforcer". If the European Commission agrees with Italy's conclusions, it has the power to impose fines of up to 10% of Apple's worldwide annual revenue. For a company that reported $391 billion in revenue last year, that ceiling is roughly $39 billion. The fine for a first violation is unlikely to reach that cap, but the threat is real.

THE BACKUP PROBLEM

The technical detail driving this probe is worth unpacking. When an iPhone user initiates a full backup through iCloud, iOS packages not just app data but the device's entire configuration: home screen layout, saved passwords, health data, message history, and the exact state of every app. Third-party cloud apps can back up files and photos stored inside their own container, but they cannot reach the system-level data that makes iCloud's full restore seamless.

Apple's argument would likely be that granting that level of access to a third-party app creates unacceptable security risks. A badly designed backup tool could exfiltrate sensitive data or introduce a sandbox escape that compromises the entire device. The counterargument, and the one the Italian regulator appears to be making, is that Apple could design a safe API but chooses not to, effectively reserving the feature for itself.

APPLE STILL TO RESPOND

The Italian investigation will proceed while Apple has the opportunity to respond. If the regulator's preliminary findings harden into a formal complaint, the case moves to the European Commission, which can open its own proceedings. The two-stage process means this could take years, not months, before any final ruling or fine.

But the real effect may come sooner. Regulators across Europe are watching each other's work. A finding that Apple's iCloud preference violates the DMA would strengthen parallel investigations in other member states and put pressure on the Commission to act on the broader pattern of self-preferencing, not just cloud backups but payment systems, browser engines, and now AI assistants.

Apple's response to the investigation has not been made public. The company typically declines to comment on active probes. What is known is that Apple has been given the authority's evidence and will have the chance to argue why its approach is lawful. The burden of proof under the DMA falls on the gatekeeper to show compliance, not on the regulator to prove harm.

NEED FOR A COMPETITIVE MARKET

This is the first DMA probe opened by Italy, but it will not be the last. Every EU member state now has the incentive to hunt for violations in their own market, because the referral mechanism gives them influence without requiring them to manage the full enforcement process. For Apple, that means a multiplying front of investigations, each consuming legal and engineering resources that could otherwise go toward product development.

The cloud case also highlights a tension that runs through every DMA enforcement action. The law was designed to create competitive markets, not to dictate product design. But when the most effective way to comply with the law is to redesign the product, the line between regulation and design mandate blurs. Apple will argue that the DMA forces it to build features it believes are unsafe. The Commission will argue that safety concerns must be proven, not asserted.

For now, iCloud remains the only service on iOS that can back up a device fully. That is exactly what the Italian regulator says the law was meant to prevent.