Sending a text message home to boast about a beach vacation should cost less than half of what it does now, EU regulators said Tuesday.

The European Commission wants to set a price cap for text messages of 11 euro cents (16 U.S. cents), far below the current EU average of 29 euro cents (43 cents). The EU’s top telecom official, Viviane Reding, said she was putting the new rules forward because telecommunications companies had not responded to her call for them to lower text prices.

The effort builds on an EU campaign last year to slash the cost of voice calls made and received outside a user’s home nation. And it comes as the cost of text messages also has come under scrutiny in the U.S., where a key member of the Senate Judiciary Committee has asked the nation’s top four wireless carriers to justify why prices for individual text messages have doubled since 2005.

The European action was met with disapproval from companies that say the EU is interfering in the market and that their lost revenue could harm their plans to invest in future technology.

The EU regulators will also ask for a stricter cap on voice calls. The plan would bring prices from the current level of 46 euro cents (68 cents) per minute to 34 euro cents (50 cents) per minute for a cell phone call made abroad. Receiving a call on a mobile phone internationally would incur charges of 10 euro cents (15 cents) by July 2012, down from 22 euro cents (32 cents) now.

The EU also wants telecom companies to institute per-second billing after the first 30 seconds of a call, claiming that the practice of billing in one-minute increments makes customers pay 24 percent more than they should.

And it seeks tighter control over mobile Internet fees, saying consumers must be able to set their own upper limit for data roaming charges to avoid “bill shocks” of thousands of euros for expensive downloads abroad.

The European Parliament and EU governments must agree to these changes before they could become law by July 2009.

Text messages are wildly popular in Europe, especially among people under the age of 25. Some 2.5 billion were sent last year at a total cost of 800 million euros ($1.18 billion).

The cost of sending a message from abroad varies widely in different nations. Latvians on vacation in Spain can pay as much as 70 euro cents ($1.03) per message, while Germans would pay just 32 euro cents (47 cents).

Reding said these charges could not be explained by the underlying cost for companies handling the messages, which she said were less than one cent.