The Commission’s own summary of the problem is a set of behaviors most people recognize. A game sells a random reward and will not say the odds, a countdown resets when it expires, and a video autoplays the next one. A creator praises a product without mentioning who paid. On Wednesday the Commission published a proposal called the Digital Fairness Act, and it addresses each of those in one instrument.
The headline number is 13.7 billion euros a year, about $15.1 billion, which the Commission says European consumers would save if the rules worked as intended. The Commission puts the cost to business at 1.2 billion euros a year, or 678 million after adjusting for overlap with measures already in force. Both figures come from the impact assessment attached to the proposal, and both are estimates produced by the body proposing the law.
The legal form is what practitioners noticed first. Protection against unfair commercial practices has lived in Directive 2005/29/EC, which 27 member states transposed with their own wording. The proposal replaces the directive with a regulation, directly applicable and identical everywhere. The Commission calls that a precondition for centralizing enforcement at Union level, which a parallel proposal on consumer protection cooperation would enable.
The substance arrives in five groups. Dark patterns and manipulative interface design would be prohibited, with a list of banned techniques plus a general catch-all, rather than the current after-the-fact assessment. Pricing rules would require disclosure of how many units are available at an advertised price, ban drip pricing, and oblige sellers to show the real-time maximum price to consumers waiting in a virtual queue for tickets.
Spending-maximizing design gets the most detail. Variable reward systems such as loot boxes, wheels of fortune and card packs would have to disclose what is on offer and the probability of obtaining it. Paid loot boxes and pay-to-win or pay-to-progress mechanics would be unavailable to minors, and all consumers would get a simple tool to switch variable rewards off. The obligations apply to games and, in places, to social platforms and AI companions.
Attention-maximizing features face a similar structure. Consumers could disable persistent prompts, endless scrolling and autoplay, and the proposal extends the restriction to AI companions and general conversational chatbots, a notable reach for a consumer law drafted around shopping. Some features would be prohibited for minors and off by default for everyone else.
Influencer marketing gets its own article and an unusually specific one. Traders must label commercial communication clearly and prominently, at the outset, in the language of the communication, using the words “advertisement” or “commercial collaboration.” Brands and agencies must contractually require influencers to comply, which puts liability on the party holding the budget. Influencers would be barred from promoting products that cannot legally be advertised, and from pushing minors to buy or to pressure their parents.
Two provisions point at the next wave of commerce. Consumers would have explicit rights when an AI agent makes a purchase on their behalf, and a right to reach a human customer service representative. Both anticipate a market in which software, not the person, completes the transaction, which is the same territory airlines are contesting from the other side.
Subscriptions round out the package. A consumer must be reminded before a free trial converts to a paid contract and must actively accept the paid terms. Reminders are required before automatic renewal, cancellation must be easy, and an automatically extended subscription can be terminated any time with short notice. Anyone who has tried to cancel a service online will recognize the gap being closed.
The proposal goes next to the European Parliament and the Council, where the disputes will be about definitions rather than direction. “Addictive design” has no settled technical meaning, and a rule a court cannot apply is a rule that gets litigated instead of obeyed. The Commission’s answer is to shift the burden of proof in personalization cases, which eases enforcement and makes compliance advice harder to give.
Industry will argue about the numbers and the scope. Gaming companies note that loot box disclosure is already required in several member states and that one European rule is cheaper than 27. Platforms will note that the Digital Services Act already governs some of the same interface questions, and that two regimes with different enforcers produce conflicting guidance.
The Commission’s framing is competition as much as protection. A merchant that avoids dark patterns is at a disadvantage against one that uses them, and harmonized rules remove that disadvantage while raising costs for everyone. That is the standard case for consumer law, and it has generally held up.
What remains open is whether a regulation written for shopping can govern attention. The mechanisms it targets were built to hold a user’s time, and time is not a product a consumer buys. The Commission has decided that the commercial consequences of that design are its business. The Parliament will now decide how far the definitions reach, and the answer will determine whether this is a consumer law with a digital chapter or a digital law with a consumer chapter.
