In some areas of telecoms regulation, there is a gap between operational permissibility and perceived acceptability.
Providers can comply with the written rules while later being treated as having crossed a behavioural boundary anyway.
Those behavioural boundaries are not always visible in advance because they are not operationally defined by the rules themselves.
How behavioural legitimacy sits within structurally ambiguous regulatory space
Ofcom’s regulatory system currently operates partly through written rules and partly through interpretation and the expectations created by political pressure, media pressure and contextual acceptability around what behaviour is considered acceptable at a particular moment.
That creates a difficult environment where providers are not only expected to follow the rules, but also become part of the mechanism through which behavioural boundaries are established by pressure-testing space that may only later be judged acceptable or unacceptable in retrospect.
Pricing regulation demonstrates this particularly clearly, with the framework relying more heavily on transparency and communication requirements than on operationally defining what pricing behaviour is allowable.
Similar patterns have appeared repeatedly over time. Ofcom’s 2019 Fairness for Customers commitments asked major providers to voluntarily commit to principles of fair treatment that already sat alongside existing consumer law and Ofcom rules.
Out-of-contract pricing exposed the same underlying dynamic. Following its 2019 review of broadband pricing, Ofcom identified significant harm — loyal and vulnerable customers routinely paying substantially more than new customers for identical services — but acknowledged it lacked the power to directly constrain pricing through formal controls. The response was voluntary provider commitments, transparency requirements and fairness framing. Yet the gap between what the market permitted and what the regulator considered acceptable remained; the governance layer sitting around it simply became more visible.
What happens in reality is that businesses operate commercially inside the space created by market regulation. Where the rules permit a broad range of conduct, commercially rational behaviour inside that space can itself become part of the mechanism through which behavioural boundaries are later discovered.
When economic conditions, media narratives or political pressure later bring particular pricing behaviours under scrutiny, the practical behavioural boundary can begin to crystallise retrospectively around a specific case. Formal compliance may no longer settle the question of behavioural legitimacy, and providers can quickly become framed as “bad actors”, while a consumer-versus-provider narrative emerges around conduct that may still sit within the operational rules themselves.
This creates a system where behavioural and reputational pressure become part of how pricing behaviour is governed without the need for more explicit operational rules.
The O2 mid-contract price rise controversy in 2025 demonstrated this tension. Although Ofcom’s January 2025 rules required providers to state annual price rises in pounds and pence upfront, O2’s later decision to increase those prices beyond the originally communicated amount triggered significant political, media and regulatory criticism despite Ofcom framing its concern largely around the “spirit” rather than a direct breach of the rules themselves.
The behavioural boundary therefore became visible through public and political reaction rather than through a previously operationally defined prohibition.
Despite government intervention following the O2 controversy, what followed was the 2026 Telecoms Consumer Charter — a public commitment by providers to operate not just within the written rules, but within broader standards of acceptable – yet still undefined – conduct, with providers effectively being asked to commit to behaviour extending beyond strict operational compliance. It also served as a visible response to controversy without resolving the underlying ambiguity that produced it.
The risk this approach carries is that the underlying problem increasingly becomes framed as one of provider behaviour or provider morality rather than recognition of the gap that exists within the rules themselves between formal compliance and what later becomes considered as acceptable conduct.
The narrative becomes one of provider ethics rather than framework design — of trust, promises and intentions rather than structurally ambiguous boundaries and the rational commercial behaviour they predictably produce.
This ultimately creates a structurally awkward system in which providers become part of the mechanism through which behavioural boundaries are retrospectively discovered — with legitimacy shaped not by clearly defined rules in advance, but also through political reaction, public controversy, media pressure and the reputational narratives that form around particular cases after the fact.
Which raises the broader structural question: at what point should behavioural boundaries in commercially sensitive areas be operationally clearer beforehand, rather than relying on retrospective political and social boundary-setting?