Digital Fairness Act Proposal
On 11 November, the Commission adopted jointly the proposal for a Digital Fairness Act and a Simplification Directive. The goal is to strengthen protection and digital fairness for consumers, including vulnerable consumers and children, in the digital environment, while ensuring a level playing field, clarifying and simplifying rules for businesses in the EU.
Specifically, the Digital Fairness Act (DFA) proposes changes to consumer law to tackle commonly reported problems consumers face online, such as with dark patterns and addictive design, practices encouraging overspending, unfair personalisation targeting their vulnerabilities, problems with social media influencers, obscure dynamic pricing and misleading pricing practices, obstacles with managing contracts concluded online, such as difficulties with their cancellation, automatic renewals of subscriptions, unwanted conversion of free trials into paid subscriptions or the inability to reach a human interlocutor for customer service.
The DFA and the Simplification Directive are part of the Consumer Package to update EU consumer laws, which also includes a revision of the Consumer Protection Cooperation Regulation. Together, they represent the most significant upgrade of EU consumer protection legislation in over 20 years, strengthening both consumer law and its enforcement.
Documents
Consultations for the preparation of the Digital Fairness Act
The preparation of the Digital Fairness Act was informed by several consultation activities, including:
- a Public Consultation,
- a Call for Evidence,
- a Children Survey through the EU Children’s Participation Platform,
- the Youth Policy Dialogue.
- and the Implementation Dialogue on consumer protection in the digital environment
Digital Fairness Fitness Check of EU consumer law
The Digital Fairness Act (DFA) builds on the results of the Digital Fairness Fitness Check.
In its 2020 consumer policy strategy, the “New Consumer Agenda”, the Commission announced that it would analyse whether additional legislation or other action was needed in the medium-term to ensure equal fairness online and offline. In 2022, the Commission launched a Fitness Check of EU consumer law on digital fairness in order to evaluate the situation.
On 3 October 2024, the Commission published a Staff Working Document with the conclusions of the Digital Fairness Fitness Check. The aim of the Fitness Check is to evaluate whether the current rules are fit for purpose to ensure a high level of consumer protection in the digital environment. It covers three core Directives: the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, the Consumer Rights Directive, and the Unfair Contract Terms Directive. The Fitness Check showed that these rules remain both relevant and necessary to ensure a high level of consumer protection and effective functioning of the Digital Single Market. At the same time, it identified several harmful, evolving practices that consumers face online and points to areas for improvement which should be addressed in the future. To achieve digital fairness, the Fitness Check pointed towards the need to do more to address the identified challenges in the digital environment. This included tackling the most harmful practices, such as dark patterns, preventing regulatory fragmentation, promoting fair growth, ensuring the coherent application of EU consumer law and the EU digital rulebook, facilitating more effective enforcement, and simplifying existing rules without compromising the level of protection.
The Commission consulted the public through several consultation activities, including a Call for Evidence and a public consultation.
The Fitness Check was supported by an external study (see Final Report Part 1, Part 2 and Annexes) and existing analyses, such as the behavioural study on unfair commercial practices in the digital environment.
- General publications
- 4 October 2024