Comment Seems pretty plausible. (Score 1, Troll) 169
I don't know whether they'll be able to get past the requirement that Apple have sufficient market power in at least one of the tied products; but it seems like a pretty straightforward argument that iCloud is tied to iDevices in a number of ways that typically aren't wholly without justification(eg. having iCloud be the only thing you can restore from reduces the complexity of the first-run restore option because it can just assume iCloud; rather than Apple having to define an interface that 3rd party restore providers would offer or add a pre-restore app install section so that the relevant 3rd party app could be installed to provide the restore interface(the way 3rd party apps can snap into the "Files" app); but which are...awfully convenient...given Apple's margins on both cloud storage and higher storage phone models.
It probably doesn't help(if Apple seeks to make some sort of "we do it for the security of the people!" argument) that iOS historically(and still does, though it is much de-emphasized) supported either unencrypted or encrypted backups and restores over USB when directly connected to a computer; so clearly it was possible to design a backup mechanism for an untrusted storage medium back when cabled syncs were still general practice; and they specifically didn't bother to do that for networked backup and restore.
It probably doesn't help(if Apple seeks to make some sort of "we do it for the security of the people!" argument) that iOS historically(and still does, though it is much de-emphasized) supported either unencrypted or encrypted backups and restores over USB when directly connected to a computer; so clearly it was possible to design a backup mechanism for an untrusted storage medium back when cabled syncs were still general practice; and they specifically didn't bother to do that for networked backup and restore.