Italy's competition authority last month opened a formal investigation into Apple over whether the company blocks rival cloud storage providers from offering full-device backups on iPhone and iPad, a restriction that the regulator says may breach interoperability rules under the European Union's Digital Markets Act.

The Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato, known as the AGCM, resolved at its meeting on June 9, 2026 to launch proceedings against Apple Inc., Apple Distribution International Ltd and Apple Italia S.r.l. The order, signed by Secretary-General Guido Stazi and Acting Chairperson Elisabetta Iossa, concerns Article 6(7) of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925, the provision that requires gatekeepers to open their operating systems to hardware and software providers on equal terms. Saverio Valentino serves as rapporteur on the case, while Dr Gabriella Romano is named as the official responsible for the proceeding.

At the center of the dispute is iCloud, Apple's cloud storage and backup service, and whether its privileged access to iOS and iPadOS internals gives it an advantage that competing services cannot replicate. According to the AGCM's order, a whistleblower report received on April 9, 2025 and later supplemented on July 24, 2025 and February 16, 2026 alleged that Apple's operating systems prevent end users from performing a full backup of an iPhone or iPad on any cloud service other than iCloud.

A complaint built on device backups

The complaint that triggered the investigation focuses on a specific technical capability: the ability to back up an entire device, not merely individual files. A full backup, as described in the order, captures photographs, documents, contacts, messages, application data and system settings and preferences in one operation, and restoring it lets a user recover a device or transfer everything to a new one without manual reconfiguration.

According to the whistleblower's submission, Apple does not grant this capability to competitors because it withholds access to the Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, that would be necessary to build it. Public documentation reviewed by the authority reportedly points to further limits as well; alternative cloud providers, the complaint suggests, may also struggle to back up individual apps or components, and may be denied the background-processing functionality that lets iCloud synchronize data without requiring the user to keep an app open.

If accurate, the AGCM's order states, this would leave users of iOS and iPadOS devices with a narrower set of choices than the DMA is designed to guarantee. Rather than freely choosing among competing cloud storage providers, users would find themselves nudged toward Apple's own service, since only iCloud can perform the full backup that most people expect from a modern smartphone or tablet. The order notes that iCloud's free tier offers 5GB of storage, an allowance the authority describes as generally insufficient to store a complete backup including app data and device settings, a gap that would push users who want full protection toward a paid iCloud+ subscription.

Why Article 6(7) matters here

Apple was designated a gatekeeper for iOS on September 5, 2023 and for iPadOS on April 29, 2024, both decisions of the European Commission under Article 3 of the DMA. That status carries specific obligations. Article 6(7) requires gatekeepers designated for an operating system to allow, free of charge, effective interoperability with the same hardware and software components available to their own competing services, and to make those components accessible to alternative providers on equal terms.

The European Commission set out how it interprets that obligation in two specification decisions dated March 19, 2025, addressing feature-level interoperability requests directed at Apple. Those decisions established that interoperability must be effective in practice, not merely nominal, and that equal terms do not require an identical technical solution, only one that delivers the same functionality available to the gatekeeper itself. Partial access, or access to a lower-quality version of a feature, does not meet that bar, according to the Commission's own reasoning as cited in the AGCM order.

The Italian authority is not itself empowered to rule on DMA compliance; that power sits exclusively with the European Commission in Brussels. What Article 38(7) of the DMA does permit is a national competition authority, where domestic law provides for it, to open its own investigation into possible non-compliance and report its findings back to the Commission. Italy's parliament granted the AGCM this specific power through Article 18 of Law No 214 of December 30, 2023, and the authority adopted its implementing procedural regulation on July 23, 2024. The AGCM informed the Commission in writing on June 8, 2026, one day before the resolution was adopted, as the DMA requires before any national investigative measure of this kind begins.

The financial backdrop

Apple's scale gives context to why a backup-and-storage dispute carries weight. The order cites Apple's 2024 annual report, indicating global net revenue of approximately €361.3 billion for the year, of which roughly €93.6 billion, or about a quarter, was generated in Europe. Devices, chiefly the iPhone, accounted for around 75.4 percent of that global total, while services such as Apple Music, Apple TV and iCloud made up the remaining 24.6 percent.

Cloud storage itself is a market the order treats as sizable and growing. Citing external market research, the AGCM's order states that Europe's cloud storage services sector reached a value of approximately €30.3 billion in 2025, with an estimated rise to €36.1 billion in 2026, an increase of roughly 19 percent within a single year. Whatever the outcome of the investigation, that scale explains why access to full-device backup functionality is treated as commercially consequential rather than a narrow technical footnote.

How the case will proceed

The AGCM's resolution sets a formal procedural timeline. Legal representatives of Apple Inc., Apple Distribution International Ltd and Apple Italia S.r.l. have sixty days from notification of the order to request a hearing, and any such request must reach the authority's Digital Platforms and Communications Directorate at least fifteen days before that period closes. The case file will be available for inspection at the same directorate. The order specifies that the proceedings must conclude by March 31, 2027, giving the investigation a defined outer boundary of roughly nine and a half months from the June 9 resolution.

Because the DMA reserves enforcement authority to the European Commission, the AGCM's role here is investigative rather than adjudicative. Its findings, once complete, will be reported to Brussels to support the Commission's own enforcement work, mirroring the cooperative structure that the DMA established between national competition authorities and the Commission through the European Competition Network.

This is not the first time Apple's Italian operations have faced scrutiny of this kind. On December 22, 2025, the AGCM fined Apple 98.6 million euros for abuse of dominant position tied to its App Tracking Transparency framework, a case built on Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union rather than the DMA. That decision followed a similar finding in France, where the French Competition Authority imposed a 150 million euro fine on Apple in March 2025 over the same tracking-consent framework. Neither of those cases concerned cloud interoperability, but both established a pattern of Apple facing parallel national-level scrutiny in Italy and France that runs alongside, rather than instead of, Commission-level DMA enforcement.

The Commission has already used its own enforcement powers against Apple once under the DMA itself. On April 23, 2025, it fined Apple 500 million euros for breaching the regulation's anti-steering obligation, a provision concerned with how Apple lets developers direct users toward payment options outside the App Store. The iCloud interoperability question raised by the AGCM's June 9 order is a separate obligation entirely, concerned with operating-system access rather than payment steering, but it adds to a lengthening list of DMA provisions under active examination where Apple is concerned.

A pattern of expanding cloud scrutiny

The AGCM's order arrives as European regulators more broadly turn their attention toward cloud infrastructure as a competitive chokepoint. On November 18, 2025, the European Commission opened three market investigationsexamining whether Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure should be designated as gatekeepers under the DMA, despite neither meeting the regulation's standard quantitative thresholds. A third strand of that November inquiry examines whether the DMA's existing rules can adequately address competition concerns across the cloud sector generally, including interoperability obstacles between cloud computing services and constraints on business users' access to their own data. That investigation is due to produce a report within eighteen months, potentially informing future delegated acts under Articles 12 and 49 of the DMA.

Seen alongside that broader inquiry, the AGCM's iCloud case reads as a narrower, device-specific instance of the same underlying question: whether the technical architecture connecting operating systems, hardware and cloud services can be used to entrench incumbent providers regardless of formal openness elsewhere in the ecosystem. Apple itself has argued publicly that interoperability obligations of this kind create risks it considers unacceptable. In a statement issued on September 24, 2025, the company criticized the DMA's impact on European users, describing feature delays and citing specific interoperability requests it said would expose sensitive data, including the complete content of a user's notifications and a device's full Wi-Fi network history. Apple has not issued a public statement specifically addressing the AGCM's June 9 order as of this writing, and neither has responded through named individuals attributable in company statements to the iCloud investigation itself.

What comes next

The investigation's core factual question is narrow but technically consequential: does Apple withhold from competing cloud providers the same operating-system access that iCloud enjoys for full-device backup, individual app backup and background synchronization? The AGCM's order frames this as a possible violation rather than a settled finding, language consistent with the early investigative stage the case now occupies. Apple retains the right to respond, request a hearing and present its own account of the technical constraints before any conclusions are reported to the Commission.

For companies operating in adjacent cloud storage or device-management markets, the outcome could clarify how far Article 6(7)'s equal-terms standard extends into functionality that gatekeepers have historically treated as proprietary to their own hardware. A finding against Apple would not, on its own, impose a fine or a remedy at the Italian level; that authority remains with Brussels. But it would add another data point to the Commission's assessment of whether Apple's broader compliance posture under the DMA meets the interoperability standard the regulation was written to enforce.

Timeline

  • September 5, 2023: European Commission designates Apple as a gatekeeper for the iOS operating system.
  • April 29, 2024: European Commission designates Apple as a gatekeeper for the iPadOS operating system.
  • April 9, 2025: Whistleblower report received via the AGCM's platform alleging Apple blocks full-device backups to non-iCloud cloud services.
  • July 24, 2025: Whistleblower report supplemented with additional information.
  • March 19, 2025: European Commission issues specification decisions interpreting Article 6(7) interoperability obligations for Apple.
  • February 16, 2026: Whistleblower report supplemented a second time.
  • June 8, 2026: AGCM notifies the European Commission in writing of its intent to open an investigation.
  • June 9, 2026: AGCM resolves at its meeting to launch a formal investigation into Apple under Article 38(7) of the DMA.
  • March 31, 2027: Deadline set by the AGCM for the proceedings to conclude.

Summary

Who: Italy's Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato, or AGCM, opened proceedings against Apple Inc., Apple Distribution International Ltd and Apple Italia S.r.l. Saverio Valentino is the case rapporteur, and Dr Gabriella Romano is the official responsible for the proceeding.

What: The authority launched a formal investigation under Article 38(7) of the Digital Markets Act into whether Apple's iOS and iPadOS operating systems fail to provide competing cloud storage services with the same interoperability that iCloud enjoys, particularly regarding full-device backup capability, individual app backup and background data synchronization.

When: The AGCM resolved to open the investigation at its meeting on June 9, 2026, after notifying the European Commission in writing the previous day. The proceedings must conclude by March 31, 2027.

Where: The investigation is conducted in Italy by the national competition authority, though its findings will be reported to the European Commission in Brussels, which holds sole enforcement authority under the DMA across the European Union.

Why: A whistleblower complaint, first received in April 2025 and supplemented twice since, alleged that Apple withholds APIs needed for competing cloud providers to offer full-device backups on iPhone and iPad, potentially steering users toward iCloud in violation of the interoperability obligations gatekeepers must meet under Article 6(7) of the DMA.