From Market-Maker to Market-Shaper: Para-Digmatic Policy Change in Europe’s Digital Sector.

Telecommunications and digital infrastructures (DI) – spanning networks, semiconductors, cloud and edge computing, the Internet of Things, data platforms, and artificial intelligence – are the backbone of Europe’s connectivity, value chains, and digital services. For decades, EU governance of these sectors was deliberately neoliberal: a light-touch framework designed to enable competition and correct market failures at the margins. Today, by contrast, DI has become one of the Union’s most strategically vital policy arenas, defined by state interventionist measures, such as public investment, capacity-building, and security-driven regulation, at a scale that would have been inconceivable when DI policy emerged as a technocratic, market-oriented remit in the mid-1980s. We offer a long-term analysis of EU DI legislation, systematically coding policy instruments and objectives at the level of individual legal acts. The results show a paradigmatic shift: from a predominantly neoliberal portfolio aimed at enabling markets and mitigating externalities to an increasingly interventionist and industrial-policy orientation. This highest-order change is visible in both the objectives pursued and the instruments deployed, indicating a veritable reconfiguration of the EU’s approach to governing digital infrastructures. The article contributes to debates on EU industrial policy by providing structured evidence of this transformation and clarifying how Europe’s regulatory state is being recast to govern, procure, and secure its digital foundations.