[ko27]

Wrong. If tourist movement is spread out across Europe equally, then mostly nobody will need to subsidize anything, since the mobile operators will be paying each other. Of course, cost per GB is different in some regions, but interestingly most popular tourist places are on the Mediterranean where data plans cost less.

[halloij]

> If tourist movement is spread out across Europe equally

It's not.

[ko27]

I know. Some operators will benefit slightly, some will not. And every tourist is satisfied. This is what I would call a good policy.

Also there are protection plans in the policy for the extremely unlikely scenario that a company is not making a net profit.

[ptaipale]

It's not "slightly". There's a considerable imbalance.

[ko27]

Source?

[ptaipale]

Wikipedia, in the tourism article, links to WTO:

http://www.e-unwto.org/doi/pdf/10.18111/9789284418145

Million tourist visits per million population:

  Finland: 2.7/5.5 = 0.49
  Sweden: 10.5/9.9 = 1.06

  Spain: 68.2/46.5 = 1.47
  Greece: 23.6/10.8 = 2.19

(I quoted above Italy, which does not have that high visitor/pop ratio, but you get the idea.)

And about current competitiveness of operators, World Bank data at http://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/where-are-cheapest-and-m...

Percentage of income going to operate a mobile phone:

  Finland: 0.34
  Sweden: 0.38 

  Spain: 1.52
  Greece: 0.49

And this with typically restrictive data quotas in southern Europe, and no data caps in the north.

I.e. the new EU regulation punishes competitive markets severely. But yes, it might help the economy of southern EU countries by making it attractive for them to acquire operators from north, get rid of competition and start the same level of extraction they do on their own population.