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AbstractAlthough experimentalist governance – presented as a novel alternative to conventional hierarchical governance – has attracted attention over the past 15 years, we still know little about its real spread and scope conditions. Examining the application of competition policy to the digital sector, the article reveals that the European Competition Network and the procedures modernized in the early 2000s actually host a variety of governance processes, ranging from hierarchical development and enforcement of stable solutions at one extreme to experimentalist discretion of local actors, review of their implementation experiences, and central revisions in their light at the other. Futher, shifts from hierarchy to experimentalism might reverse. As for explanations, variation in governance processes cannot be explained by formal distributions of power, which were the same. Instead, the greater the uncertainty about solutions and the weaker the readily available coalitions in their support, the more actors favored experimentalist governance, and vice versa. The broader implications thus caution against general claims, challenge the influence of legal factors, and suggest that far from being necessarily antitethical, functional and political factors may bear together on the spread of distinct forms of governance.

Published online by CPI on January 17, 2017 ; The Digital Agenda is one of the key pillars of the EU's industrial policy. One of its aims is to strengthen the creation of a single market and one of the issues that the Commission proposes to tackle is geo-blocking. This refers to practices by sellers which make it costly or impossible for consumers with residence in one Member State to obtain goods and services from other Member States as well as the rerouting of customers away from websites hosted in other Member States to a website hosted in the Member State from where they are based (e.g. customers in Italy rerouted from a ".pt" version of an online store to its ".it" version) without their consent. Based on the welfare enhancing effects of a single market, the Commission is keen to deepen this integration as consumers move to using the internet to secure services and make purchases using this channel. In this paper we outline the Commission's regulatory efforts to enhance cross-border trade through the use of competition law and a rich package of proposals for secondary legislation. We argue that the regulatory framework looks like an important first step, but that it does not go far enough to address this issue and that there must be enforcement capacity to yield meaningful results. By rushing the geo-blocking agenda without adequately addressing these pitfalls, the EU risks undermining another of its flagship projects, adding to the increasing concerns about the end of roaming charges by June 2017 introduced by Regulation 2015/2120.