Country of Origin Regulation in Cross-Border Media: One Step Beyond the Freedom to Provide Services?

Abstract

The E-commerce Directive 1 has introduced a country of origin rule 2 for the provision of online services (‘information society services’). This means in principle that service providers are only subject to the rules of their country of origin or home country, ie the country where they are established. The country to which they are providing the services to, the country of destination, must refrain from applying its regulations. For regulators this means that they must not applytheir national regulations to services provided from another Member State 3 (‘incoming services’).Likewise they must extend national regulation to services provided to residents in another MemberState (‘outgoing services’).