— By Innocenzo Genna, Legal specialist in EU digital policy, competition and liberalization regulations
For European digital regulation, we’re at the beginning not only of a new year but of a new five-year mandate of the European Commission, which began operating at the end of 2024 with significant changes, starting with the replacement of Commissioners Vestager (competition) and Breton (digital), replaced by Spain’s Ribera and Finland’s Virkkunen respectively. It’s therefore reasonable to wonder what can be expected from such a profoundly renewed institution regarding prominent positions in competition and digital areas.
The mandate that has just concluded saw a profound transformation of Internet rules, with the entry into force of new fundamental regulations such as the Digital Service Act, the Digital Market Act, and the Data Act, whose effective impact on the digital ecosystem can only be verified in the coming years, after a minimum implementation period has been consolidated. Nevertheless, we can already see how the new rules have rebalanced the relationship between the Internet world and telecommunications, making the debate on the usual level playing field less relevant. Important regulatory asymmetries continue to exist where different and distinct areas are concerned, such as between cloud services and network access. In the few markets that are still hypothetically overlapping, particularly messaging, the discussion remains open, but it’s now an issue whose economic relevance is less marked than in the past.
The new Commission, whose digital policy is guided by new Commissioner Virkkunen, will primarily look at infrastructure resilience, as well as digital autonomy and sovereignty issues. There will therefore be a specific focus on the proper implementation of the DMA and cybersecurity regulations. Sector modernization will also be a priority, with particular attention to artificial intelligence and eIDAS II.
What’s less predictable is the approach toward the telecommunications sector. Outgoing Commissioner Breton clearly aimed to address the concerns of large telco operators through a policy of industrial consolidation, relaxation of antitrust rules, and, in general, reduction of competition. This positioning, although supported in some passages of the Letta and Draghi reports, encountered strong opposition from national regulators, united in BEREC, but especially from the Council, which found the Commission’s position poorly supported by factual and market evidence. In particular, the priority issues of large European telcos, namely consolidation and fair share, which have monopolized European telecommunications debate over the last 2 years, appear significantly scaled down from the Council’s perspective.
What will new Commissioner Virkkunen do now, whose cultural mindset is certainly very different from Breton’s? She will certainly have to deal with the political legacy of the previous Commission, represented by the White Paper, but, at least initially, will focus more on less controversial issues, particularly network resilience and administrative and regulatory simplification, while regarding the “hot” topics, namely consolidation, fair share, and competition, a period of additional reflection is likely, to avoid an escalation with the Council and BEREC that would have been a leap into the void even for predecessor Breton.
