Italy's competition authority, the AGCM, has launched a formal investigation into Apple under the European Union's Digital Services Act, according to Reuters.
At the heart of the probe is whether Apple must give rival cloud storage providers the same kind of access to iOS and iPadOS that iCloud enjoys — essentially, the seamless hooks into the iPhone and iPad ecosystem that make Apple's own service feel native to the device.
According to Reuters, the AGCM's position is that competing cloud providers should receive this interoperability for free, putting them on equal footing with Apple's own iCloud offering.
The investigation adds Italy to the growing list of European regulators using new digital competition laws to scrutinize how Big Tech companies treat rivals on their own platforms. The DSA, which took effect across the EU, was designed in part to prevent dominant platforms from giving unfair advantages to their own services.
For ordinary users, the stakes are straightforward: if regulators succeed, iPhone owners could one day find it just as easy to use Google Drive, Dropbox, or any other cloud service as they currently do iCloud — with the same deep integration for backups, photo syncing, and file access that Apple's own product provides today.
This matters because it could fundamentally reshape how Apple is allowed to design the relationship between its hardware, software, and services — a bundle that has become one of the company's most lucrative revenue streams.