New EU law could force Apple to make it easier to move iCloud data to other cloud services

If you've been following the tech world in the last few years, you'd know that the European Union has undertaken different actions to try to limit the "power" of big tech corporations. We've seen proposed legislation on many fronts aimed to make the tech world more competition-friendly, for instance.

Now, the latest advancements by the EU on the topic are on cloud services, reports AppleInsider. A new act intends to make it easier for people to move their data between services, including iCloud.

EU working on a law to make moving your data between services easier

As you may know, Apple's systems are pretty closed off to third-party solutions. iCloud storage is not an exception, and it's not very easy to transfer your data from it to other storage solutions. The Data Act, which was proposed in 2022 by the European Commission, aims to make the process easier.

The European Commission reached an agreement on the proposed legislation, moving it forward (of course, as you know, it's not going to become a law immediately, it needs to pass different stages before getting to that point). The legislation aims to simplify moving to alternative data services, but also aims to protect against unauthorized data transfers, and puts in place interoperability standards.

But that's not all! The Data Act also gives more power to customers and companies in how the data generated by their products can be used.

As for Apple, this means the company will have to modify iCloud to simplify the process of transferring data to another service, like for example Google Drive. Right now, Apple has an app for Android that's called "Move to iOS" which makes it easier to transfer your data, obviously, for Android to iOS. But an app that does the opposite is not available by Apple at this point.

The EU has been working on legislation aimed to reduce the monopoly of big tech for quite some time now.

We have legislations like the Digital Markets Act (the DMA) and the Digital Services Act (the DSA), which got signed into law last year. The first one is responsible for ensuring fair competition in digital marketplaces (like for example third-party app stores on iPhone). The second legislation focuses on regulating online content and aims to hold big tech (like big social media for example) responsible for dealing with illegal content on their platforms.