As part of its supporting tasks, the Commission is tasked to produce and make publicly available every two years an overview of market trends that might affect consumers’ interests, enforcement actions carried out under the CPC Regulation in the past two years as well as an overview of the statistics exchanged by means of alerts.
The first biennial report was published in April 2022 and found that the activities of the CPC network in 2020 and 2021 were largely dominated by the impact of the COVID19 pandemic, given the resulting economic disruptions and confinement it caused. The Network also initiated a record number of joint actions on different practices carried out by big online platforms.
The actions taken with respect to online platforms have resulted in the following improvements:
The CPC network identified a number of concrete market trends likely to affect consumers’ interests across the single market in the foreseeable future. They can be grouped into 4 areas:
- Changing landscape in digital marketing and new persuasive techniques
- Environmentally sustainable and other “green” marketing practices
- Continued COVID-19 trends with negative impacts on consumers
- Increased globalisation leading to proliferation of similar harmful market practices around the globe
You can download the full report below.