A recently-published European Commission report analyzing regulation and competition in the telecom sector deduced that Europe's regulatory framework and open framework for industry competition, far from impeding innovation, accounts for why Europe is apparently ahead of the U.S. in usage of web services, social networking sites and virtual worlds.

Notes the report, "The regulation of access networks keeps open the potential bottleneck to competition in broadband markets. European rules have provided a real choice for consumers."

The rest of the report deals with policy pertinent to the telecom industry in Europe, but observing the evidence does seem to indicate the region's ahead of the U.S. in terms of widespread adoption of so-called "next generation" web services, and it's interesting to hear what role the bandwidth biz plays in that lead.