Apple (AAPL, Financials) is facing another regulatory headache in Europe, this time in Italy. Italy’s competition regulator opened a probe into Apple’s cloud services to review whether the company is following interoperability rules under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act.
Put simply, regulators want to know whether Apple is making it fair and practical for rival services to work with its ecosystem.
The investigation is still at an early stage, and no penalty has been announced. But for Apple, it adds to a growing list of European regulatory challenges around how its platforms operate.
For investors, this is not likely to move earnings right away. The bigger issue is whether repeated EU scrutiny forces Apple to change parts of its services business or raises compliance costs over time.
The next thing to watch is whether Italian regulators ask Apple to make changes to its cloud practices.
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