The applicable standards were set high in order to “protect the integrity of elections, ensure they are free and fair, and not captured by a narrow range of interests.” However, the legislative steps taken by the member states and regulations implemented focused on the offline context. Therefore, their applicability and efficacy in times of digital political advertising turned out to be severely limited. As mentioned earlier, in recent years policy-makers, governments and civil society alike had to face the reality of there being limits to law enforcement of the current regulation on the internet, including as regards the applicability of existing regulation on electoral campaigns.