In brief, the com­plex­ity cre­ated by a patch­work of dif­fer­ent national rules and the fact that in each coun­try the media mar­ket and/or the pub­lic ser­vice media are com­ing under increas­ing polit­i­cal pres­sure dis­cour­ages com­pa­nies from enter­ing new mar­kets, in par­tic­u­lar where sub­jects hold­ing shares in a media under­tak­ing also play a sig­nif­i­cant role in the polit­i­cal arena. This jus­ti­fies the full com­pe­tence of the Union to take action through an approx­i­ma­tion of national laws (arts. 26, 50 and 114 of the Treaty on the Func­tion­ing of the Euro­pean Union). As a gen­eral rule, in shap­ing these new pro­vi­sions, the Union is required to uphold the high­est pro­tec­tion to fun­da­men­tal rights as guar­an­teed by the EU legal order, in par­tic­u­lar the free­dom of infor­ma­tion as enshrined in Arti­cle 11 of the Charter.
For the above-mentioned rea­sons, the sig­na­to­ries of this ini­tia­tive believe that the har­mon­i­sa­tion of rules on pro%C