Equal treatment. Technology neutrality. Consumer protection. These principles sit at the heart of the Single Market and have long underpinned Europe’s approach to competition and regulation.
Yet Europe still regulates communications by corporate ancestry rather than by what users actually receive.
Services that look and feel the same to consumers are subject to very different rules because of who provides them. As Europe debates the Digital Networks Act, that inconsistency has become impossible to ignore.
If Europe wants a digital economy that is innovative, resilient and fair, the principle should be simple. The same service should be subject to the same rules.
The communications ecosystem has outgrown its rulebook
Over the past decade, the communications ecosystem has fundamentally changed. Traditional voice and messaging services are no longer the default way people communicate. Today, most
Europeans rely on IP-based services, messaging apps, cloud collaboration tools and digital platforms that are often functionally equivalent from the user’s perspective.
This is now a mainstream shift. In 2025, 82 per cent of Europe’s 16- to 74-year-olds used messenger services such as WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram.¹
For businesses, cloud-based communications and collaboration tools are increasingly standard. These services shape traffic flows, user experience and network demand just as much as traditional telecoms services ever did.
The economic scale of that shift is measurable. Within the wider digital communications ecosystem, content and applications generated €466bn in turnover, compared with €407bn for telecoms services.²
Europe’s rulebook has not kept pace. Obligations on consumer protection, security, resilience and public-interest functions still fall overwhelmingly on traditional telecoms providers. But other actors increasingly shape how communications are delivered and where risks arise. That mismatch now affects competition, accountability and consumer protection.
Asymmetry matters for consumers, not just operators
Public evidence points in the same direction. The EU telecom customer journey is affected by 34 distinct regulatory obligations, and telecom operators face regulation across eight relevant policy areas compared with three for tech companies.³
For example, during prospect and onboarding phases, operators must meet overlapping customer identity verification, disclosure and consent requirements that often duplicate checks already performed by digital platforms or payment providers.
Then during contract and usage, obligations multiply across service quality, security, fraud prevention and dispute handling, even where customer experience is increasingly shaped by apps, cloud services and device ecosystems outside telecoms’ control.
This asymmetry is often dismissed as a sector complaint, but the impact is most clearly felt by consumers.
Telecoms operators invest heavily in fraud prevention, network-level controls and cooperation with authorities. Yet fraudulent activity increasingly originates or is amplified upstream, across digital platforms and online services that are not subject to comparable obligations.
The consumer cost is already material. In 2024, the EBA and ECB reported €4.2bn of payment fraud across the EEA, with payment service users bearing around 85 per cent of total fraud losses for credit transfers.⁴
Emergency communications present a similar problem. Consumers expect that regardless of the app or service they use, access to emergency services will be reliable. Europe’s current framework guarantees this only for traditional telecoms services, not for functionally equivalent OTT alternatives that many people treat as primary communication channels.
For example, the same pattern appears in open internet rules and resilience. Telecom operators are held accountable for service quality and continuity. But end-to-end performance increasingly depends on cloud providers, content delivery networks and large platforms that sit outside equivalent oversight.
This is misaligned responsibility, and it weakens outcomes for the users Europe seeks to protect.
The Digital Networks Act risks freezing imbalance into law
The Digital Networks Act is rightly framed as a once-in-a-decade chance to modernise Europe’s connectivity framework. It recognises the need for investment, simplification and greater consistency across the Single Market.
But on regulatory symmetry, the DNA falls short. Core obligations remain largely confined to traditional telecoms providers, while the digital actors that shape traffic flows, user experience and service continuity remain largely outside scope.
The risk is that the DNA freezes a two-tier regulatory system into law. If the Act is to deliver on its ambitions, rules should follow what a service does and the control it exercises over outcomes, not the legacy category it happens to fall into.
As the DNA text is negotiated, the test should therefore be practical rather than ideological. Where services perform comparable functions for users, obligations should be comparable too.
That requires three shifts:
- First, the DNA should include an explicit functional-equivalence principle, giving regulators a clear mandate to apply obligations consistently where services perform comparable roles for consumers.
- Second, definitions must reflect reality. The distinction in particular between number-based and number-independent communications no longer maps neatly onto user expectations or market dynamics.
- Third, responsibility for outcomes such as resilience, fraud mitigation and ensuring an open internet should be better aligned with the actors that materially shape them, whether they operate networks, cloud platforms, content delivery systems or messaging services.
Done properly, this would rebalance competition and accountability across the digital value chain.
Fairness as a foundation for innovation and investment
Europe’s digital future depends on innovation, investment and trust. A framework that applies obligations unevenly will continue to undermine all three. It will distort competition, weaken incentives for long-term network investment and leave gaps in consumer protection.
A genuinely level playing field would not weaken innovation. It would strengthen trust in the digital services Europeans already use, while giving every actor clearer responsibility for the outcomes they shape.
If the DNA rises to this challenge, it can help build a digital ecosystem that is open, innovative and resilient. If it does not, Europe will lock in imbalances that become harder and more expensive to fix with every passing year.
FOOTNOTES
1: Online messaging service usage in the EU – Eurostat (Jan 2026)
Want to know more?
- Who controls Europe’s technology, and why does it matter?
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