After two decades of failed efforts to spur innovation and competition in Europe’s lagging communications sector, the European Commission has promised “an ambitious overhaul” next year as element of its far-reaching Digital Single Market initiative. Until now, the EU had hoped to drive down prices for DSL-based Internet services by compelling network providers to start their facilities to new entrants at discounted prices. But that policy came at the cost of badly degraded incentives for suppliers to put money into new technologies, leaving the EU with fiber optic networks minimal cable Internet, or high speed mobile broadband.

Congress, nevertheless, wisely left the net out of that experiment, letting fixed and mobile broadband access markets to develop mainly independently.

Because of this, the U.S. has seen almost a trillion and a half dollars in private investments for cable, cellular, fiber, and next-generation copper/fiber hybrid vehicle services. This has helped lead to the development of advanced Internet-based companies, where 11 of the top 15 Internet businesses, most started in the past decade, are U.S.-based, with the remainder coming from China. None are from Europe.

So it is no surprise that European regulators are eager open their markets to real competition and to reverse path. And, conversely, no surprise that partisan critics of the light-touch U.S. regime are just as determined to ensure that the EU instead doubles down on a strategy widely acknowledged to have failed absolutely.

The writers, an American team composed of a legal academic and a communications professional who’ve long advocated nationalization of U.S. internet access, admonish the EU to “avert the errors” of U.S. policy and instead “continue promoting the competitive market framework that has served European consumers nicely.”