Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes, who oversees telecommunications and the Internet across the 27-country EU, blamed the problem on a lack of competition.
Her predecessor, Viviane Reding, shocked the telecoms industry in 2008 by capping the amount mobile phone companies could charge for calls, sending text messages and downloading data while abroad. The European Parliament backed the proposals last year.
"The [European] Commission's review of the Roaming Regulation must look at the source of the problem and potential solutions in their full context," Kroes said in the text of a speech prepared for delivery at a European Telecommunications Network Operators Association (ETNO) conference.
"The relevant context is the lack of a really competitive single market for all aspects of telecoms services in Europe."
In her previous job as EU competition commissioner, Kroes imposed fines worth billions of euros on companies that broke EU antitrust rules.
In her speech, she said a genuine EU single market should be one where price differences between voicemail, text messages and data were based only on the actual cost of providing these services.
"I will assess the structural, economic and legal barriers to such a true single market and I am not afraid to propose the necessary measures to overcome these," Kroes said.
"But some real out-of-the-box thinking is needed for that. In this scenario the exorbitant cost of 'roaming' abroad within the EU is an outdated concept," she said.
Kroes said she would not impose price ceilings just for the sake of it, but would unveil new proposals if necessary.
"We will not be proposing another barrier, and nor will we propose endless tweaking of the current price capping arrangement without adding anything new. I want the gap between roaming and domestic prices to approach zero."
On the difficult issue of net neutrality - level access to the Internet - Kroes said regulators would probably not intervene if there was more competition in the market.
"Strong competition in broadband markets may allow a more relaxed regulatory approach to net neutrality issues," she said.
Stéphane Richard, chief executive of France Telecom, said he was "not fully comfortable" with the high-speed Internet proposals released this week by Kroes.
"If the underlying philosophy of the European Commission is to look at networks like a commodity, or a utility, [next-generation Internet] is not the best investment case we can offer our shareholders," warned Richard at the conference.
US warns against regulation
Speaking to EurActiv, US Ambassador for International Communications and Information Policy Philip Verveer, also warned of the "perverse consequences" of regulation.
However, the US would "be happy", according to Verveer, to see a streamlining of EU member states' copyright laws, which would potentially expand e-commerce across national borders.
"From an efficiency perspective there is no question that it wouldn't be a very desirable outcome" for copyright requirements, which are currently set by each member state, to be "streamlined" into a single EU version, he said after Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes' had pledged to simplify European standards as part of the 'Europe 2020' strategy at the EU telecoms council in May.
"One of the complexities standing in the way of making full use of the Internet in Europe is that it is intertwined in issues of culture," Verveer said.
Separate search engines exist in the EU for sites such as Google, and member states are divided between applying judge-written common law or codified law with regards to copyright. Only 4% of EU companies currently trade across more than ten member states.
(EurActiv with Reuters.)
