I don't want to turn totally OT but... it is an interesting point and you may well be right, but intuitively I would not necessarily think so. I think the genesis of EC261 is basically that the EU granted airlines a number of regulatory changes which they had been asking for for months, and the EU (quite sensibly in my view) made it a condition in its internal discussions that this should come with strengthened regulatory protection for passengers. It's worth remembering the context of the first discussions of the regulations, at the time when a number of scandals about Ryanair's treatment of passengers occurred. This revealed gaps in the regulatory regime that were difficult to address because of the strength of the air transportation organised interests, but became possible as part of a 'package deal' which generally made airlines' lives much better. Paradoxically, legacy airlines may have been part to the idea because they were precisely insistent that the FR and U2 of this world were not providing passengers with the same guarantees as they did (at the time they saw low cost airlines as public enemy no1, many still do). So I think the reg has a lot more to do with internal balance, a negotiated compromise that many airlines were actually fully associated with, and a need for the EP to show that they care about the interests of citizens at least as much as that of companies than about expectations of a regulatory spread (which might also have been there but which in my view would not be the key element here).