Italy’s antitrust regulator opens a probe into Apple’s cloud services

Italy’s competition authority has opened an investigation into Apple over its cloud services, examined under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act. The move places Apple’s cloud business under a regulator that has already become one of the company’s more persistent adversaries in Europe.

The Digital Markets Act is the framework doing the work here. The EU’s flagship competition law designates the largest platforms as “gatekeepers” and imposes obligations on how they treat rivals and customers, and it gives national authorities such as Italy’s AGCM a role in enforcement alongside the European Commission.

A probe brought under it signals that the regulator is examining whether Apple’s conduct in cloud services meets the law’s requirements.

What the investigation alleges in detail was not fully set out in the initial reporting, and the specifics will shape how serious it proves. The general shape of DMA cases against Apple has concerned the terms it sets for third parties and the degree to which it advantages its own services, and a cloud-focused inquiry would most plausibly turn on questions of that kind.

Until the authority lays out its theory, the precise concern is best treated as not yet public.

Apple is no stranger to the AGCM. The Italian regulator has fined the company repeatedly over the years, from misleading warranty practices to, more recently, a roughly €98.6m penalty over its App Tracking Transparency rules, which the authority found disproportionately burdensome for developers and advertisers.

That history matters because it means this probe arrives into an established adversarial relationship rather than a standing start.

It also fits a broader European pattern. Apple faces DMA scrutiny on several fronts across the bloc, and national regulators have grown more willing to test the company’s conduct in specific product areas rather than waiting for the Commission to act centrally.

A cloud-services probe extends that scrutiny into a part of Apple’s business that has drawn less regulatory attention than the App Store, at a time when Europe’s wider cloud dependency has become a political question as much as a technical one.

The stakes under the DMA are not trivial. The law allows for substantial penalties, up to a share of a gatekeeper’s global turnover for serious or repeated breaches, which for a company of Apple’s size translates into very large numbers.

National probes such as Italy’s can feed into that wider enforcement picture, even where the headline fine is set centrally by the Commission, which is part of why a single member state opening an inquiry carries weight beyond its borders.

What comes next is procedural. An opened investigation is a beginning, not a finding, and it can run for many months before producing a decision, a settlement, or a dismissal. For now, the company has another European regulator examining another corner of its business.