The purpose of the European internal market is to allow all firms in the Union to compete freely, without artificial barriers built up to protect them. The Treaty provisions and the subsequent case law are quite comprehensive and they are meant to eliminate restrictive regulatory barriers,...

This paper analyses when EU intervention is needed to achieve this internal market for electronic communications. 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...