Driven by the development of fixed and mobile broadband communication infrastructures, cloud computing and Big Data analytics, the provision of machine-to-machine (“M2M”) applications is a rapidly developing and growing market. This paper will show that M2M communication using the Internet Protocol has specific characteristics that set it apart from traditional electronic communications between human participants. It will assess the impact that these differences have on the application of current laws, on regulation and on regulatory policy and will offer views on how the challenges resulting from the rapid development of M2M services could be met.