What is the digital internal market and where the European Union should intervene?

This paper analyses the digital internal market and when EU intervention is needed to achieve this internal market. It sets legal and economic criteria to determine the appropriate scope of the EU
intervention. It applies these criteria to several case studies and concludes that sometimes the EU
intervention is not justified (choice of regulatory remedies in many national markets, regulation of
mobile termination rate, price control of Next Generation Access networks), whereas in other cases
EU intervention is justified (entry regulation, international roaming, spectrum).
The paper calls for a more open debate of the concept and the means to achieve the digital internal
market. It also submits that EU intervention should focus on the areas where its benefits are the
highest (in particular given the possibilities of economies of scale provided by the technology or the
cross-country externalities), and where its costs are the lowest (in particular given the heterogeneity of
national preferences or the need for regulatory experimentation and competition). Therefore, EU
intervention is more relevant for the content part of digital regulation (such as copyright, privacy,
electronic commerce, dispute resolution) than for the infrastructure part (i.e. the electronic
communications networks and services). In particular, this paper calls the Commission to use with
extreme caution its new power on regulatory remedies, especially in the context of the deployment of
NGA, given the uncertainty on the best form of regulation.