Lawyers advising clients operating in or negotiating with network industries deal with sectors that are ostensibly Europeanised – but where considerable regulatory discretion is nonetheless granted to national regulators. Those advising cross-border clients can find that the rules and approaches applied as the norm in one Member State are very different from those applied in another. This article applies an approach drawn from the political science theory of “varieties of capitalism” to explain why, despite the creation of European Regulatory Frameworks, there are still divergent national regulatory regimes. Understanding the nature of the regulatory regime in a national utility sector and its interaction with the relevant European framework should assist the legal theoretician in explaining national divergence in the interpretation of regulatory discretion, and the practitioner in developing appropriately tailored legal and lobbying strategies on behalf of clients. Recent academic literature has argued that the varieties of capitalism thesis needs to be modified to recognise the exogenous force of EU regulatory frameworks in shaping national varieties of capitalism in the network industries. We examine the extent to which the design of the macro EU regulatory framework actually permits them to exert such a force. Our contribution is to show that the macro principles contained in the frameworks for network industries are typically not constraining and that variation in the formal sectoral rules applied in Member States persists. We find that constraint in EU regulatory frameworks is avoided in sectors where there is significant variety in the sectoral capitalisms practised by the Member States. The theoretical explanation is that EU frameworks are endogenous to the collective path dependencies of national varieties of capitalism in a legislative system where Member States must agree the rules.