Electronic Services with a Non-electronic Component and their Regulation in EU Law

This article explores the problem of regulating the so-called "composite services", which are services consisting in both an electronic and a non-electronic element, in the EU. The proliferation of platform economy has made this problem acute as EU regulation of the services sector is still divided between the law applying to information society services and the law applying to the offline world. Since the two regimes are different, there is a strong incentive for providers of innovative platform services to claim treatment as information society services only, often attempting to avoid burdensome market access rules. This article looks at present EU law in this area as well as at the recent CJEU attempts (Uber, AirBnB) to draw guidelines for distinguishing between different kinds of services and regimes applicable to them. An attempt at summarizing the salient features of future policy in this area is made at the end.